I had a deposition last spring that ran nine hours with one short break, a hostile witness who talked over the questioning attorney constantly, three people speaking at once for long stretches, and my job in that room is to somehow produce one clean, accurate transcript out of that mess afterward. I got home that night wrung out in a specific way that has nothing to do with physical exhaustion, more like my whole capacity for parsing language had been spent for the day, and I remember standing in my kitchen trying to decide what to read and reaching, of all things, for Blood Meridian.

That confused me at the time. You’d think after a day of untangling overlapping, chaotic speech I’d want something easy, short sentences, clear punctuation, nothing demanding. Instead I wanted McCarthy’s unpunctuated run-ons, his refusal to mark where one thought ends and the next begins, and it took me a few pages to figure out why. The book wasn’t asking me to untangle anything. It was just handing me the density directly, no correction, no cross-talk to sort out, no obligation to get it exactly right for someone else’s record. I could just let the sentences wash over me instead of working to pin them down.

I remember sitting on the kitchen floor with Judge pressed against my leg, not even in a chair, just down on the tile because I didn’t have the energy to walk the extra ten feet to the couch, reading the same page in Blood Meridian twice without noticing I’d done it, and feeling something in my chest actually loosen for the first time since that morning. That witness had talked over the attorney so consistently that my notes from the day were full of brackets and question marks, places I’d have to go back and reconstruct later from the audio, and there was something almost physically restful about a sentence that refused to be reconstructed into anything cleaner than it already was. McCarthy wasn’t going to argue with me about what he meant. He’d already said it, exactly once, and that was the whole transaction.

I’ve noticed the pattern since, on rougher work days I gravitate toward denser, harder prose rather than lighter stuff, which is the opposite of what I’d have guessed about myself before I paid attention. A coworker I mentioned this to, another transcriptionist who freelances the same circuit of firms I do, said she does the exact reverse, wants total fluff after a hard day, nothing that asks anything more of her. I don’t have a tidy explanation for the difference. I think it’s just that my job trains me to hunt for the correct version of something messy, and some nights what I actually want is permission to stop hunting and just receive the mess as it is. Judge, for his part, has no opinion on any of this, he just wants whoever’s on the kitchen floor to stay there long enough to be worth lying against.