Poor Tony's Withdrawal and seizure
Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dim-lit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony’s flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the second week in the stall time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end.
Context
The time-sequence opens — the book's most sustained phenomenology of suffering, and this theme's darkest run. Poor Tony, friendless and hiding in an Armenian Foundation Library stall, enters true heroin Withdrawal: time gets edges (the same edge Gately remembers from his first six months, twenty pages earlier), then a body — a column of ants, each taking its cut of flesh as toll for carrying time forward. Then the metaphor swallows the setting whole: the corridor of Withdrawal IS time, lightless at either end.