I am really excited. Just in time for the new season (which starts tomorrow night for those who do not live in a household full of LOST fanatics), I have deduced the exact location of LOST island. Well, almost, I know the longitude, not the latitude.

Let me back up and tell you where I got the brilliant idea that led me to this knowledge. I’ve been reading In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson. I have never read anything by Mr. Bryson, but he makes me laugh so I’ll be reading more of his stuff. Anyway, this book is about Bryson’s travels to and through Australia, and right at the beginning of the book I found it. Here’s the seminal quote:

Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international date line. . . . For me, there was no January 4. None at all. All I know is that for one twenty-four hour period in the history of earth, it appears I had no being.

There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn’t hurt at all, and to be fair, they do give you the day back on the return journey when you cross the date line in the opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick.

You see it immediately, don’t you? The LOST plane survivors somehow crashed exactly on the international date line, and they’re caught between two days. It’s not purgatory or heaven or hell, or a science lab, or even a real honest-to-goodness island; they’re in limbo. (Limbo: the supposed abode of the souls of unbaptized infants and of the just who died before Christ’s coming.) I just stuck the definition in for fun, although I’ll bet half of those LOSTies were unbaptized infants; I mean the kind of limbo where you’re in between two places, or in this case, two dates.

They’re stuck. They can’t go back to Australia, and they can’t go on to LA because they’re crashed in a time warp on the international date line. And when you get stuck outside of time or in between times, anything can happen. Polar bears survive on a tropical island. Dead men walk. Certain numbers might be holding the world together. Diseases are healed. Your raft gets pulled back to the same island you left. And when they do escape, they’ll arrive in LA on the same day that they left Australia —or the day before.

NOTICE: DO NOT tell me someone else already thought of this theory and posted it on some message board somewhere and it’s already been discredited. It may not be right (or even profound), but it’s mine, and I’m sticking to it. Unless one of you independently discredits my theory. Or I find a better one.

I’ll see you on the other side of the date line tomorrow night after LOST. May the good guys win, whoever they are.

Late-breaking news: The LOSTies may be lost forever. The Pope has abolished limbo. Question: If you get stuck in a time warp, and the time warp sort of limbo place you’re stuck in gets abolished in real time, where are you?
LOST!