the papers are in the hands of the authorities

"It is done, and it was done for the best. About this, I have nothing more to say. No further apology to offer." --Darcy, Pride and Prejudice

Yesterday, my co-conspirator kindly accompanied me to the university of my choice (and the only one whose deadline I had not missed by the time of my spontaneous yet deeply-felt decision to become an academic.)

The SFU academic quadrangle was apparently built on the principle that the structures of learning should be puzzles themselves. We began with an easy riddle: we knew the graduate office was on the sixth floor, yet, walking into the quadrangle, we saw a building of three stories.

Hmm.

Entry into the building is accomplished by a number of unlabled, identical smoked glass doors and large industrial elevators. We chose the elevator, on the principle that if you don't know where you're going, you might as well get there quickly.

On stepping into the elevator, we saw that it did, in fact, claim to go to a sixth floor of some kind, possibly within extradimensional space.

The doors opened onto a hallway, and not into empty air, so we leapt onto the linoleum before it could vanish.

We wandered for some time before we realized the simple, yet elegant design the architect had set out for us. The circuit of the sixth floor is a fifth-dimension moebius strip. (That is to say, as a moebius strip exists as a two-dimensional plane by manipulating three-dimensional space, the corridors of the AQ twist in six dimensions but act as a five-dimensional space. Although of course the structure possesses a 6D 'thickness' as the paper used to make the strip would have some 3D-ness.)

You follow the hallway around four complete circuits of the 'quadrangle' (a mathematical misnomer, for although only four sides are visible in our schema, they are of course multiplied as I have indicated) and on the fifth you reach the Engilsh Department.

On the journey you pass many nearly identical seating areas, water fountains, and tiny, tiny bathrooms. Windows look out onto a variety of landscapes -- mountains, sky, coils of building writhing in and out of visible 3D space. Elevators appear and disappear. Panelling and artifacts of distant ages suddenly surround you. Whole corridors are filled with the dusty whisperings of long-dead critical theorists.

Be wary. The PoliSci department has been decked out as an imitation of your goal, to distract you. If you wander into the wrong office, the moist, pulsating walls of the strangely vegetative cavity will devour you slowly. Or you will drop quite suddenly into a cafeteria filled with snickering psychology students who will give you a bit of cheese and a condescending pat on the back, and send you on your way.

But we found the office, and we delivered my application. "Do you want it in an envelope?" I asked the kindly, if weary guardian of the files. "Why?" she asked, kindly, wearily. "I'll only have to take it out again."

Finding ourselves again in the area whence we had entered the sixth floor, (And asking ourselves where we'd been all this time and were we trying to give us a heart attack,) we took the same elevator down. It opened into the same place, and indeed, the very moment, that we had left. The young man across the quad looked up in bemusement at the two of us, as to him we appeared to have entered and then immediately exited the elevator.

We breathed the crisp, unfiltered air, and stepped over the boundary line into the ordinary world, a little wiser, a little nostalgic for our adventures, but glad to be home.

Then we had to do it all again because I forgot to pay the application fee.

rf

*Also, in the elevator on the way up the first time, the third person in the elevator (she) asked us if we were brothers. My co-conspirator pointed to himself. "Husband." he said. He pointed to me. "Husband." he repeated.

"Brothers in the struggle." I said.