Crank Shaft (ROUND 2)
Let's workshop this piece about the entanglement of voyeuristic desire and moral complicity, and the particular inertia that follows when both dissolve into witnessed tragedy.
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Few edits today, especially of the opening and the ending.
Crank Shaft
I have not gotten up from the curb. The ambulance had taken the body long ago. I just sit here. An officer had been next to me. What more could I add? What need was there? She took my words anyway. I keep sensing her scribbling at my side. Who knows when she left.
Much more day remains. Yet the stillness is of twilight, an alien twilight. Any charge there might have been has dissipated even as the stillness refuses to end. I feel the opposite of out of breath. But I cannot seem to catch myself breathing. Not one sub-woofer rattle, not one weedwhacker—a hush has skewered the neighborhood. Like children stuck whispering in the wake of a parental spat that had dipped not only into screams and shattered glass but then into throttled taunts gushing out from the pretzeled mound of mommy on the floor (“Beat it up, nigga! Beat that asshole up!”) and made all the juicier under the Eden eyes frozen in the hallway (“Keep it open! Let em see the shit”), even the dogs next door have stopped the usual efforts to escape their minds: the chronic digging, the chronic whining and barking, all of us fight to ignore—if only for what it says about us, not just as stewards of nature but as members no less embedded than any other.
A feral cat peeks out from the flea bush of the condemned house across the road. He was a kitten when I found him two summers back. I had been trimming that same bush. Normally he would come to me, going low to the ground as he sped across the street. I am the only human whose touch he will permit. He seeks it out most of the time, mewling with needs neglected in forced adulthood through New York extremes, even though it places him in that spiritual bind between having to make biscuits and having to maintain the sleepless guard only severe infirmity could allow him to drop. We make eye contact. He looks around. As if the world to him, despite the lack of usual traffic, were full of tripwires visible only to creatures more attuned to intuition, he slinks back into coverage. The squirrels too have stopped leaping. One on a branch over the street, washed out by the high angle of the sun, watches me like a statue.
Sitting here—what else would I do but sit here? The kid, my neighbor’s little boy—I saw the whole thing. It happened while I was watching the mother’s ass through the blinds. I had watched it since spring. But this was the first time through the blinds. She would wave at me in the garage during my workout. I would bite my lip and shake my head. That had become our thing. Every afternoon she kept in sight across the street, never wasting one bend to the wrong line of sight. The vision of how blown out she must be, especially against how tight she kept what was visible to the public eye—for some reason, stranger still with how white her skin was, pulled hunger grunts from my throat. I had started taking off my shirt and she trimmed down to a hiking bra.
Trash blows across the front yards here. Every morning candy wrappers and chip bags will appear out of nowhere. And this morning she had been bending all around to pick it up, her boy putting on his helmet on the sidewalk and her girl in the driveway pedaling the toddler trike. Taking care of myself would be the only thing to save a family. I did not want to waste what I had onto the floor. But I had to. It had gotten to that point. You could feel it. Calling her over would be all I needed to do. She would not need the Hennessy I tucked in the freezer for such a moment.
The boy had some room to grow into the bike. Other than getting on and off, though, he was solid. I had given the bike to him. It had been my son’s. “Oh my God. How can we ever thank you?” the mother said, staring like she had something in mind. “It’s just sitting there. So no biggie,” I said, forced by her glare to direct my eyes at the husband.
The boy had his helmet buckled and stood at the curb. I had just about had my fill. But his struggle to get the bike going kept pulling my focus. What I had in store would already wind up a waste. I did not want it doubly wasted. So I eased back, waiting for him to get going-frustrated that he could not get it going. There were only so many more bends warranted.
The boy—he just tipped over. He pressed down really hard. I told him he has to stand up to put his weight down on the pedal to get going. If he had gotten going, he would have been good. He could ride. I had given him tips. And I told him to mind the cars. Cars go too fast on this road. I told them all that. They had moved here in the winter. They asked if they could borrow my shovel that first day. And the first thing I told them, seeing that they had kids, was about the cars. I told them that it has been my war for almost a decade. Cars gun it, almost like a “Fuck you” to the signs I put out.
The boy tipped over, trying to get motion. He tipped over the wrong way. Two chains of causality—I saw them meet. I saw them meet before they did. But what could I do? Yelling would have done nothing. There was not enough time. Even if I had my pants on, what could I do? My hand was greased with Vaseline. I saw the tire run over the worst spot. I heard the helmet pop. I wiped down my hands with paper towels. They were still greasy. I had scooped too much in my heat. I prayed at the kitchen sink. I prayed I was mistaken as I waited for the water to heat up enough to lather the dish soap. If I had really thought the prayer would have efficacy, would I still have taken this me time? Would I still have prioritized my vanity? I did not want to touch him like this if I had to touch him. But if marathon runners go on with diarrhea running down their legs—what would that have even mattered?
My ass hurts. My back hurts. The unreleased load has befuddled my loins. But I must stay. I have no idea why. The squirrel has moved on. I did not see it move. Thoughts rose and dropped away in a time that feels forever despite what the sun says. I pictured myself slurping the mom, fat maternal petals meaty as tuberose smells, to make her feel good. I pictured it after the funeral, in the car—to give her some distraction. I pictured whispering “I’m gonna give you another baby” as I unload, hushing her like a baby herself with those words. The shame of such thoughts, just like the thoughts themselves—all of it keeps receding and yet I remain here.
No one has come for me. My ex-wife will not be here until tomorrow afternoon. I picture myself being here—not having eaten anything, not having taken a sip of water—when she pulls up for drop off. I picture myself, haggard looking from her point of view through the windshield, milking this somehow for my advantage—sympathy for me. But that does not suffice to explain why I stay.
Thoughts about how this might be performative in some way (neighbors perhaps looking out their blinds), how this might be a way to thank the universe for it not being my own son or even an offering of sorts to ensure that nothing like this ever happens to my son—those thoughts drop away each time they rise. The choppy internal stream, one busy intrusion to the next, has become more distant—like the legs of those treading water from the perspective of one sinking away from the light.
Now I am mostly empty. The deep gears I have always known to spin have stopped. I lie back. I can feel the planet’s core latched to my bones, its implacable suckle—all draw, no release. I feel one with the tree, one with the buzzing wire. Torpor like this I have never known—an absence of desire, or more like an absence that eats up all desire or thoughts or shame or what-ifs. The sun bothers my face. I have reason to get up. But how can I?
“Crank Shaft” is a story about collision—not merely the collision between a child and a car, but the collision between desire and catastrophe, narcissism and grief, private fantasy and public reality. Its central achievement lies in its refusal to arrange these forces into a morally reassuring hierarchy. The narrator witnesses the death of a young boy while masturbating to the boy’s mother, and the story's power emerges from its insistence that the resulting psychic landscape is not one of simple guilt, remorse, or redemption. Instead, the narrator enters a state of profound ontological suspension in which ordinary motivations, judgments, and desires lose their coherence.
The title is crucial. “Crank Shaft” immediately invokes multiple registers at once. It suggests masturbation ("cranking"), machinery, rotational force, and the transmission of energy. A crankshaft converts linear motion into rotational motion and vice versa. The story is similarly concerned with the conversion of one kind of psychic energy into another. Sexual desire becomes guilt. Guilt becomes paralysis. Paralysis becomes something approaching mystical stillness. Throughout the narrative, forces continue moving through the narrator long after the event itself has concluded.
The opening establishes this state of suspension:
I have not gotten up from the curb.
The sentence is deceptively simple. The narrator's refusal—or inability—to move becomes the story's governing image. Everything afterward unfolds from this fixed point. The body remains stationary while consciousness drifts through memory, fantasy, self-interrogation, and increasingly strange forms of perception.
The story's treatment of time is especially important. Chronological time continues. The sun remains high. The day advances. Yet subjective time has broken apart.
Much more day remains. Yet the stillness is of twilight, an alien twilight.
The phrase "alien twilight" captures the story's central atmosphere. Twilight normally signifies transition. Here, however, it appears in the middle of the day. The world has become temporally dislocated. Categories no longer align with experience.
This dislocation spreads outward into the environment itself. The neighborhood becomes unnaturally quiet. Dogs stop barking. Squirrels stop moving. Even a feral cat behaves differently. The story does not ask the reader to believe that nature has literally responded to the boy's death. Rather, it depicts a consciousness projecting its own rupture onto the surrounding world.
The result resembles what phenomenologists describe as a transformation in the structure of lived experience. The narrator is not simply observing a quieter neighborhood. He inhabits a reality whose very texture has changed.
The feral cat sequence deepens this theme.
Ordinarily the cat comes running.
Ordinarily the cat seeks affection.
Ordinarily familiar routines persist.
Instead:
he slinks back into coverage.
The cat becomes an image of instinctive withdrawal. Unlike the narrator, who remains trapped at the scene, the animal responds appropriately to danger. The narrator repeatedly attributes forms of wisdom to nonhuman creatures throughout the story. Animals seem attuned to realities humans miss or ignore.
This concern culminates in one of the story's most revealing observations:
all of us fight to ignore—if only for what it says about us, not just as stewards of nature but as members no less embedded than any other.
The line gestures toward a worldview in which human beings are not separate from nature but participants within it. The narrator's catastrophe strips away ordinary illusions of separateness. Human beings become animals among animals.
Yet the story's most daring move lies elsewhere.
The narrator's sexual desire does not disappear after the boy's death.
Indeed, it persists.
The lengthy recollections of the mother's body, the flirtatious dynamic across the street, and the narrator's masturbatory fixation are not narrative distractions. They are the story's central psychological challenge.
Most fiction would force a moral conversion here. The death of the child would instantly extinguish desire. The narrator would become purified through tragedy.
Instead, desire survives.
Even after witnessing the accident, the narrator imagines comforting the mother sexually:
I pictured myself slurping the mom
I pictured whispering "I'm gonna give you another baby"
These fantasies are shocking not because they reveal monstrousness but because they reveal continuity. Human consciousness does not conveniently reorganize itself around moral expectations. Sexual desire, grief, self-interest, pity, shame, and fantasy coexist.
The story repeatedly refuses to sort them into separate compartments.
This refusal gives the narrative its psychoanalytic depth.
Freud frequently emphasized that traumatic events do not necessarily eliminate desire. More often, trauma creates bizarre juxtapositions in which incompatible impulses occupy the same psychic space. The narrator's erotic fantasies become unbearable precisely because they persist alongside genuine horror.
The resulting shame becomes one thread among many rather than the story's defining center.
In fact, one of the most remarkable features of the narrative is how shame gradually loses its force.
Thought after thought arises:
sympathy for me
neighbors perhaps looking out their blinds
an offering of sorts
The narrator continually generates explanations for why he remains on the curb. Yet each explanation dissolves.
The story systematically dismantles psychological interpretation.
Every motive appears plausible.
Every motive appears insufficient.
The narrator eventually arrives at a state beyond motive altogether.
This movement forms the story's philosophical core.
What begins as guilt gradually transforms into something closer to ego dissolution.
The final pages depict a consciousness being emptied out:
Now I am mostly empty.
The sentence marks a profound shift. Earlier sections overflow with fantasy, memory, rationalization, and self-consciousness. By the end, the internal machinery has begun shutting down.
The image of gears is significant:
The deep gears I have always known to spin have stopped.
This may be the story's most important line.
The narrator has spent the entire narrative trapped inside mechanisms of desire, fantasy, interpretation, and self-concern. Those mechanisms finally cease operating.
The title returns here with transformed meaning.
The crankshaft no longer turns.
The engine has stalled.
Yet what replaces it is not despair.
Instead, the story enters a state approaching mystical absorption:
I can feel the planet's core latched to my bones
I feel one with the tree, one with the buzzing wire.
This language evokes traditions ranging from mystical quietism to certain forms of ecological consciousness. The narrator experiences himself not as an isolated individual but as part of a larger field of being.
Importantly, this state does not arrive through enlightenment.
It arrives through catastrophe.
The death of the child functions as an involuntary spiritual event. It strips away ordinary psychic activity, leaving behind a bare encounter with existence itself.
The story's final insight is therefore neither moral nor theological.
The narrator never discovers a lesson.
He never redeems himself.
He never achieves forgiveness.
Instead, he encounters a temporary condition in which desire, shame, fantasy, ambition, and self-justification are swallowed by a deeper stillness.
The tragedy does not make him better.
It makes him smaller.
And within that reduction, he experiences something he has perhaps never known before: a world no longer organized around himself.
“Crank Shaft” is ultimately a story about the collapse of psychic machinery. It begins with a man absorbed in private appetite and ends with a consciousness suspended between grief, exhaustion, and transcendence. Its subject is not guilt but interruption—the sudden stopping of the mechanisms through which a self ordinarily sustains its place in the world. What remains after that stoppage is terrifying, humbling, and strangely beautiful.