a soldier returns home from combat. in his mail, a letter he had written from the front to his imagined 'loved one' at home. he reads this letter that he wrote and responds to it, as if he were the loved one that he had written to. he mails it to himself at his name and address, and receives and responds to it in turn, as if he were writing back to the beloved who had written to him. he plans a trip in order to mail this letter to himself from a post office in another part of the country, so that he might come home to receive a letter from a loved one far away, to read what he himself had written as if someone else had written to him and to respond, to go away again to mail it to himself to return home to receive another letter postmarked from another distant place, and so on. In deciding where to mail the letter from, the man delves into the history of post offices that rapidly sprung up in California during the gold rush, finding that many of them that are referred to in old history books actually never existed: phantom post offices He drives 3000 miles wanting to mail the letter from the 'Lover's Leap Post Office', established Oct. 30, 1919, named after a Native American girl who plunged from its adjacent cliff out of unrequited love. but when he gets to California he's unable to locate it--there is no record or address of such a post office in the official archives: ghost post next