Some years ago I went through a McSweeney’s phase – collecting the McSweeney’s editions, and the short story collections of authors whose work I discovered in those pages. Jack Pendarvis was one such author. In his story, ‘The Pipe’, a radio DJ has been buried underground for 46 days “to break some kind of record”. The frightening thing about this story is that guarding the DJ’s air pipe on the midnight to 6am shift are a security guard and a paramedic, two people – it quickly becomes apparent – you wouldn’t trust to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel.

On the first night they smoke dope and discuss what things they could drop down the pipe, such as fire ants or cotton balls. Some nights the paramedic doesn’t turn up (he’s writing a rock opera), leaving the security guard to whisper to the DJ and force sandwiches down the pipe when he worries the DJ might be hungry. One of my favourite moments is when the paramedic plays a self-penned song for the security guard called, “Half-Hearted’, and we realise why no one has ever written a song with that title. “Half-hearted when you told me that you love me,” the song goes. “Half-hearted when you told me that you care.” (Try singing it and you’ll understand.)

I remember not being able to stop reading as the days counted down, increasingly concerned as to what would be found when they eventually dug the DJ up, given that he’d been under the not-so-watchful eye of these two imbeciles. Had Pendarvis actually provided an answer to that question, I probably wouldn’t still be thinking about this story all these years later.

First published in The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure, MacAdam/Cage, 2005