The reconfiguration: stopped caring, committed to dentistry, Schtitt's near-peer

pivotal · STANDING — since the knee

• When: STANDING — from the knee onward, in force throughout YDAU
• What: Since first the Crohn's and then the knee, Schacht has stopped really caring whether he wins — he'd describe the desire as "a preference, nothing more" — and has met his gradual displacement from the A singles squad with "an equanimity some E.T.A.'s thought was spiritual and others regarded as the surest sign of dicklessness and burnout"; only one or two people have ever used the word brave about it. Oddly his hard flat game has loosened and slightly improved since; the staff has stopped talking even about a top-college ride, but Schtitt has warmed to him "since the knee and the loss of any urge beyond the play itself" and treats him now almost more like a peer than an experimental subject with something at stake. In his heart he is already committed to a dental career, interning twice a week for a root-specialist at the National Cranio-Facial Pain Foundation in east Enfield, where he picks up jokes from facial-pain patients ("Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place," Stice reports). Hal — hobbled the opposite way, caring too much — privately fears Schacht's laissez-faire as doom-gray surrender, and almost envies it. Schacht also has a worked-out theory around the caring question: that the day-to-day unclarity of how you can "be expected both to care passionately and not care at all" — on which "huge amounts of internal psychic energy" get expended from 16 to 18 — "is not accidental or a weakness in E.T.A. pedagogy, in Schacht's opinion," though a sizable contingent view Schtitt as bats and steer instead by deLint's clipboard and "reductive statistics, which at least afford you a firm idea of where you stand" (n89 p. 1000).