“You feel like drawing?” Silas asked.
Rob took his notebook from the tilted shelf and arranged it on the fur-covered beanbag on the floor. He grabbed his sleeve of colored markers, lay on his stomach, and turned the notebook’s thick pages until he found a blank one.
“Oh wait,” Silas said. “Can you flip the record before you settle in?”
Rob got to his knees and reached for the stereo. The record on the turntable was still Helen Reddy—the same record since Sunday. He turned it over and set the needle down on the whirling black rings. The record, like all of Silas’s, was slightly warped, so the needle rose and fell as if traversing a tiny obsidian landscape full of hills and valleys.
“Thank you,” Silas said. Reddy’s bell-clear voice came through the speaker, and Rob arranged himself again on his stomach. He looked at the white page, the tight weave of the paper, ticking his black marker against his temple. Rob tried to think of what to draw. He stared at a spider’s dense web in the corner, where a wall of wood paneling met cinder block. Silas liked spiders and did not permit anyone to clear the webs in his basement. There were dozens of them.
Rob drew a ringed planet and surrounded it with stars. One of the stars seemed too big, so he made it an asteroid trailed by fire. “Is there fire in space?” he asked Silas.
“No,” Silas said. “No oxygen, so no fire.”
Rob clicked his tongue and held his pencil over the page. He thought about correcting the drawing but decided against it. He colored his fire orange and red and yellow.
“Apparently 1956 was the worst year for train deaths,” Silas said. “There were over a thousand. Mostly in India.”
Rob sketched the surface of the moon. A fly landed on his paper, crawled over a crater, and briefly disappeared in the shadow Rob had rendered. There were always insects in Silas’s room. The plants gave them sustenance and the spiders were well fed.
“What are you drawing?” Silas asked.
Rob showed him.
“The moon?” Silas said. “I think it needs more rocks.”
Rob dotted his moon with small misshapen rocks.
