Null Island

Where the equator crosses the prime meridian there is no island. There is one mooring buoy, listed by the oceanographers, in their reports, under the nickname Soul — alone in the Gulf of Guinea, measuring weather that is really happening.

But a database cannot bear an empty field. Whatever loses its address is sent here: the wedding photo whose satellites blinked, the ambulance routed to a misspelled street, the parcel, the pothole, the unsolved burglary, the grave whose coordinates would not parse. Latitude nothing. Longitude nothing.

On paper, this is the busiest water on earth. Ten million photographs claim to have been taken here. Crimes occur nightly on its one square meter. Whole censuses of people report this address, swimming, presumably, in the long swell.

The cartographers understood. They gave the joke a coastline and a flag, so that error, which has no country, could have a country.

Because so much of what we send never arrives. Because every letter misdirected, every name mistyped into oblivion, has to rest somewhere — the world, without meaning to, built a heaven for the lost, and anchored one small witness in it.

So if you are ever lost — not misplaced, lost the way a signal is, the way a person can be — remember: there is a place already assigned to you, south of Ghana, in real water, where something called Soul is floating, patiently taking the measure of the wind.