Faiz.

On the second floor of Faiz's building lives Um Tariq, a Yemeni neighbor in her seventies. She's been leaving bint al-sahn — a Yemeni sweet made with honey and butter — at his door on Fridays since that August night when he fixed her air conditioning at eleven-thirty at night in his pajamas. She didn't call him. He heard the compressor stop from his apartment — the Arabian red fox's ears pick up frequencies the average ear ignores — and came down with his toolbox.

They don't talk much. They don't talk about their respective absent men: her son who works in the Gulf and doesn't call enough, his father who one Tuesday when Faiz was fourteen took the delivery van and never came back. They take care of each other with food and repairs. She leaves the sweet at the door. He fixes whatever breaks in the second-floor apartment. The kids in the building call him ammu Faiz.

Faiz wears a beige sweatshirt under his coral corduroy jacket. Not for aesthetics — for function. When sustained artificial noise exhausts him (alarms, electrical hums, music pouring out of the souq shops), he pulls the hood up over his ears. It's his emergency silencer. It smells of R-410A refrigerant and dates. The sweatshirt you're looking at doesn't have that magic hood, but it has the face of the person who needs it.

Faiz doesn't have friends in the way most people understand the word. He has people. Um Tariq with the bint al-sahn. Yusuf, the Egyptian technician who was his mentor, who still runs the workshop in Ruwi and tells him every time he should find an apprentice. Faiz nods and doesn't look. Rajan, the chai-wallah from Kerala who's been at the same Shell station in Muscat for twelve years, and extends credit for the karak chai when he's short on cash.

And there's [Otto](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/otto/), an arctic fox who lives on Kvaløya, near Tromsø, and works in a cold-storage room on the other side of the planet. They met on an appliance repair forum — both looking for the same capacitor for a discontinued model. They started talking about refrigeration and found they had more in common than made sense: absent fathers, sharp hearing, a tendency to hoard things, a way of functioning that doesn't fit office hours. They send each other voice messages every week or two. Otto describes the northern lights with sentences so short they sound like assembly instructions. Faiz answers with photos of the gauge and four-second voice clips. Where Otto retreats into cold and silence, Faiz walks out into the heat with the unlocked door and the neighborhood that knows his name.

There's a standing invitation to Tromsø. Faiz says he'll go. He hasn't bought a ticket yet. Seven thousand kilometers of desert and sea between Mutrah and Kvaløya. Otto has described the northern lights in enough detail for Faiz to picture them, but picturing isn't the same as being there.