Excerpt from Quicksand by Steve Toltz, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"What's—"

"You know how unrequited love has no real-world applications?"

"What's your idea?!"

"Disposable toilets."

A smile forms that seems surgically rendered. He clearly feels a vicarious thrill, my thrill, at hearing his own idea.

"What's that got to do with . . . How would that even work?"

"No, wait, hang on," he says with a frown, his hands clasped as in prayer, and I let him go on, about how "imposter syndromes are rife" and we are "spanked by the invisible hand of the market," how "venture capitalists are all trying to predict new trends in sexual orientation." And he just needs to find a way to appeal to "people who want their instant gratification yesterday," or to "the half of a couple who has to secretly vaccinate the kids." I think: Aldo's conspiratorial whisper is louder than most people's shouts.

A row of poker machines ding unmusically; two patrons have migrated over. The others at the bar are staring at Aldo with cocked heads. The old reflex in me stirs, readying to react at a moment's notice, and I note Aldo's fear of being recognized, then his relief that he isn't. I write: He can't tie up all his loose ends because he has an odd number of them. He lightly taps his temple with his forefinger. I write: On second thoughts, he looks like a taxidermy fail. He spitballs about "millisecond hands on watches," and an app in which you "type in someone's cutting putdown and a devastating comeback appears." It's like hearing someone incessantly switching TV channels from another room, yet only now do I realize how much I've missed this, how much I've missed him. I feel almost giddy. In an unhurried neutral tone reserved for placating irate creditors and arresting officers, he suggests "an Amazon-like marketplace with mandatory haggling," "attention-span restoration services," and "scheduled daydreaming slots for children." His voice feels good, like cold air, but now I am losing him, only managing to get down truncated phrases without their context: "husbands claiming backdated blow jobs" and: "withering emoticons of heteroflexible tweens." I scrawl: Everything he says sounds like an echo of his marathon murder-trial testimony and everything he said before it now seems like a preview. With one elbow leaning on his armrest, he gives me a slight nod of recognition, as if I had just sat down, and says, "Since it's inevitable designer babies will be as ubiquitous as Kalashnikovs . . ." His slow drift of ideas has begun to peter out, but they've worked to release the tension in his body. His legs, I notice, are momentarily tamed. The more he talks, the more he relaxes—until it looks as if he is sprawled in a lawn chair. This is his body on dreams.

I order another beer and consume it swiftly. At this time of day it's about getting the alcohol down.

Gradually, as each billion-dollar idea fizzles and vanishes, Aldo falls silent; he can do eerie stillness like nobody's business. Tufts of graying chest hair scale the V-neck of his too-small undershirt that's rising up to reveal his belly, shining like a large, newly washed potato. He has truck-stop arm-wrestling arms these days, on which his twenty-year-old tattoos—Stella and Do Not Resuscitate, I Mean It—have begun to fade and stretch. I remember when his biceps were wrist-sized. Now his veins are like blue ropes strapping him in. I write: With his prison bulk—his strong upper body, his shoulders like rock implants—he is a heavy man in a heavy chair. I would not want to be alone with him in an elevator that isn't permitted to bear more than eight people.

"What's the point of it?" he asks, gesturing to my notebook.

"For the reader, reading pleasure. For myself, financial reward. For you, catharsis. This will be easier than confession. I'll do it for you."

Excerpted from Quicksand by Steve Toltz. Copyright © 2015 by Steve Toltz. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.