In any city, in any state, go to any mental institution or halfway house you can get yourself admitted to. Ask to see someone who calls himself the Holder of Loss. The staff will not react with confusion. They will not ask you to clarify. One of them will stand, without a word, and lead you down a hallway that you will swear was not in any floor plan you passed on your way in.
The hallway smells of something burnt. Not wood — older than wood. The smell of something that was once full of potential and is now only ash.
The Holder of Loss sits in a room at the end of the hallway. The room has no furniture except a chair and a table. On the table is nothing. That is important. There is nothing on the table and you must not be surprised by this, because surprise will make a sound, and any sound you make will cause the Holder to turn toward the table.
Do not let the Holder look at the table.
The Holder of Loss appears as a person who has been crying for a very long time. Not recently — they are not actively weeping. But the evidence is in the face: the dried channels, the permanently reddened eyes, the particular slack quality of someone who has run out of grief but cannot stop its physical aftermath. They are dressed in the clothing of someone who packed quickly and then sat in the same clothes for years.
You must ask — and you must ask this, the specific question, without variation: "What remains when nothing is left?"
The Holder will tell you. They will tell you everything that has ever been lost — every person, every object, every language, every species, every thought that was thought by someone who had no one to tell it to. This will take some time. You must listen to all of it. If you stop listening, the Holder will know.
When they finish, they will extend one hand, palm up.
Place the object you brought in their hand. You know what object. You have always known. It is the one you cannot replace, cannot duplicate, cannot bear to lose. Whatever it is — a photograph, a name, a piece of knowledge — place it in their hand.
The Holder will close their fingers around it. They will look at you for the first time.
Do not look back into their eyes. Look instead at the table, at the nothing on the table, and understand that the nothing is Object 111. It has been here all along. It is the space where something was.
You are now its Keeper.
Object 111 of 538. They must not come together.
Whatever you do, they must never come together.