Turkish coffee at four-thirty
Faiz wakes up without an alarm at four-thirty in the morning. Every day. It's not willpower or a trained habit — it's something in the body that's been there as long as he can remember. The Arabian red fox is crepuscular: its peaks of activity line up with dawn and dusk, the two hours when the temperature allows you to move without paying too high a price. The body still prefers that half-light, even when you live in a coastal city with streetlamps and traffic.
At that hour Muscat hasn't decided yet whether it's going to be a bearable day or one of those that split the asphalt. The air coming through the open bedroom window smells of salt from the harbor and of incense from the neighborhood — the bakhoor someone burned early or that simply never left entirely.
He makes coffee in the kitchen. Turkish, no sugar, in a copper pot he bought for three rials at the Mutrah souq. From the stool by the window he watches traffic starting to move: delivery vans, the odd fisherman heading back from the harbor. He checks WhatsApp. The day's jobs. Sometimes three, sometimes six. In summer there can be ten. He leaves the apartment at a quarter past five. Third floor, no elevator. The door with the latch that turns without a key.
