A Trillion Red Plastic Cups

When Owen died, he was rather surprised not to find himself in hell. He was less surprised not to find himself in heaven, but he’d expected at least one of the two places. But, instead of heaven or hell, he found himself in a room with a stack of a trillion red plastic cups.

They were cheap cups, the kind college kids always drink beer out of. He knew there were a trillion of them because there was a sign on the wall of the square, infinitely-high (he assumed) room he found himself in. The sign read “Here are one trillion plastic cups.” It didn’t make much sense to him that he should find himself in a room with a trillion cups, but he assumed he was there for a reason, and was quite happy not to have been sucked into oblivion, so he started trying to amuse himself.

The first thing he discovered was that the stack had been very precariously balanced, and the moment he touched it, it sort of exploded under its own weight, and all the trillion cups came crashing down. He could hear that hollow sound that red plastic cups make when they fall, multiplied a billion times, roaring down at him from above, and when he looked up, he could see the great red avalanche descending.

All those cups were a lot heavier than he’d been expecting, and as they rained down on him, he found himself very rapidly unable to stand, then unable to move as he was entombed by crushed red and white plastic.

Owen sat like that for a very long time, wondering of some deity might intervene on his behalf and dig him out, but after what felt like a very long time, he decided that he probably ought to try to get out on his own.

It was a very long process, and it took a thousand years by his watch, but that was all right, because he never felt hunger or thirst or the urge to pee. Boredom was still a problem, but he started composing long romantic novels in his head and conversing with imaginary characters as he dug upwards. Eventually, he found himself clawing through cups that weren’t crushed, and he knew he was near the surface.

And then, he was free, standing with his head and shoulders sticking out, surveying the square room that didn’t look much different at this altitude than it had back when the cups had still been neatly stacked. It was still square with gray walls and a sort of weird, diffuse lighting that didn’t make too many shadows.

Owen then busied himself tidying things up. He stacked all the uncrushed cups once more, and laid them down like logs along one wall, and eventually, he reached a layer where the cups had been so compressed that they were nearly perfectly flat, and he started building little castles and structures. The first thing he built was a very shaky square wall which fell down just as he was completing it, but in the decades that followed, he constructed, in order: a split-level duplex, a section of the Great wall of China, part of the White House’s rotunda, the Alamo, the tire and brake shop where he used to get his tires changed, and uncountable other fantastical buildings. By then, the cups had started to wear out and most of them were cracked and split, and his creations couldn’t stand up on their own any longer on account of that, so he started to take them apart and build things from the little strips of red-and-white plastic.

And he re-constructed the Mona Lisa and a couple of da Vinci’s inventions, and he tried to build the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but he had no ceiling and couldn’t think of a good way to suspend it using the limited building materials he had.

So he built the Globe Theater and started writing new Shakespearean plays and started performing them with his troupe of imaginary actors before an imaginary but very appreciative crowd. But after a few hundred years, he ran out of ideas, and stopped midway through writing “A Midsummer Night’s Land Rover,” and decided that it was probably high time he tried to get out of the strange place. So he gathered up all the little ribbons of plastic that he’d torn from the cups and started building a huge staircase that wound around the square walls. He found that, if he worked it properly, he could get the plastic to melt a bit, and it made an excellent adhesive, which he used to stick the multitude of structural supports to the great gray walls.

It took him a million years to use up all the cups – including the crushed ones lower down, which he had to excavate using a mineshaft he’d dug and an elevator he’d constructed. But when the last little shred of compressed plastic was in place, he still couldn’t see to the top of the shaftlike room, which was apparently infinite after all.

And as he contemplated the fact that he now had absolutely nothing to do to amuse himself, that he’d already in his eleven million years in the shaft thought of every idea that had ever been thought of, that he’d done everything that could be done in reality or in imagination, as he thought about that, he realized that he had been sent to hell after all.