the player who is only intermittently present

Poutrincourt and deLint, reading Hal's tennis, keep circling the same fact without knowing what it is — that some portion of him is chronically absent, "one not there," visibly detaching and drifting off mid-point. They mean it as a competitive flaw; after the whole book it reads as the early symptom of the coming un-reachability, the self already learning to leave the body other people are watching. [sweep · shared-ground the-body-tennis]