time as predator: the hourglass — "Then at some point he realized…"
Then at some point he realized: time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow.
Context
The book's greatest single phenomenology of Withdrawal, in which the disorder of time from 066's House ("you can hear ticking in clockless rooms") is taken all the way to its endpoint. First time acquires "sharp edges" and a body — a flesh-taxing column of ants — then an ontology: an "orange-eyed wingless fowl" squatting on the stall, then something that enters him at will, until finally selfhood dissolves entirely into duration and Poor Tony "become[s] an hourglass," a thing time passes through rather than a person who has time. Withdrawal here is not pain located in a body but the annihilation of the boundary between the sufferer and his suffering.