Poor Tony's Withdrawal and seizure (p. 304)
He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each brightly lit public second’s edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the tears. […] he sat all alone at one end of the car, feeling each slow second take its cut.
Context
Out of the stall and onto the Gray Line train, headed for the Antitois as last resort — and the stall's private time-phenomenology comes with him into public light: the seconds still have edges, the D.T. ants now drink the tears, and each second still "take[s] its cut" (the ants' flesh-toll from p. 302, now time's own verb). The respectables drift away without seeming to notice him; the sharp-edged second is the one companion that stays.