By Sean Dempsey, 04/28/26
We stumbled into the sun like criminals fleeing a sex crime we could not remember committing. It felt like Monday. But time and sanity meant nothing to us in the fog of drink and this sublime orgy of heat-infused alcohol and sin. The El Dorado resort still stretched before us in a blinding, shimmering hallucination of white stone and turquoise water, the air thick with salt and tequila fumes. The light was sharp. Too sharp, far too clean; it sliced through the skull and scrambled whatever fragile machinery remained intact inside. And there was very little. Everywhere, as far as the eyes could see… bodies. Endless bodies. A carnival of flesh. People of weird and wild shapes, colors, and sizes drifted through the heat like distorted reflections in a funhouse mirror, their savage laughter bending and snapping in the humid wind.
The alcohol had already done its work. It fused with the sun into some volatile compound! Something that warped time and smeared reality into long, indistinct streaks. Volleyball courts pulsed with manic energy, limbs flailing in exaggerated arcs, cheers echoing like distant artillery. Half-naked women wandered through the day with an ease that felt almost predatory. Fabric was clinging where it could, surrendering where it must, the whole scene inflaming the senses into a kind of restless agitation that felt less like pleasure and more like a fever dream I couldn’t wake from. No one could. The lot of us were bound together in this flesh-filled dream together and completely unable to escape.
By evening the world hadn’t calmed. It had simply mutated. The daylight madness curdled into something darker, more surreal and animalistic! I wandered aimlessly and blackly from the carnal satiation of filling my belly with the foods of the savage locals into their theater of flesh. What was this dark and vile place? The stage lit up in hot, violent colors, and the performers emerged like mythological creatures dragged from some ancient and indecent ritual. Tanned, sculpted men and voluptuous women in hats and black hair spun and twisted beneath the lights, their movements too perfect, too deliberate. All the time, from the wispy shadows, the dismal watchers (I among them) leaned forward. The fat and elderly gawkers peered at them from the darkness like horned vultures in the night, their faces flickering with a hunger that felt ancient and accusatory. We licked our lips as human bodies were paraded and gyrated before us on stage. I ordered another liquor-infused drink from the female creature who shouted something deranged and furious in my ear.
Time collapsed. The hours blurred into one long, unbroken moment of semi-conscious drift. The small group of us who remained behind began to bend or fade away into darkness… or perhaps the pounding of the drums moved us. I think we were dancing now, or something as close to that definition as our drunken and ravaged bodies allowed. We were pulled into the current of human electricity and booze whether we willed it or not. But where were our friends!? Had they abandoned us? Had they never existed at all? The foreboding question struck me like a syringe of ice through the bloodstream. The sheer and complete terror I felt in this moment cannot possibly be explained! It lingered there, heavy and suffocating, like the realization that something sacred had slipped away and would never return. I felt empty. I felt like I would never be whole. So I let the dark void consume me as I moved and danced as a heathen along with the greasy, oily, fleshy figures all moving in depraved gyrations all around me.
The dancing grew stranger. Wilder. Wetter. Knees were soaked all around us. The knees owned by animals who moved as if they were possessed by demons. The bodies around us pressed closer, movements syncing and colliding in ways that felt less human and more instinctual. It was a chaotic rhythm overtaking thought itself. The sounds blended with motion until everything became one indistinguishable surge: a feverish unity of noise and flesh. But something was wrong. Terribly wrong. The forms around me shifted. I peered at them in horror. Sagged… aged. What had once seemed vibrant now appeared grotesque, bloated, and unraveling, skin hanging loose, faces melting into expressions of desperate persistence. Who were these sick and depraved people? Where had they come from? Where had I? I felt a thousand questions descend on me like cancer as I struggled to breathe below their aged forms and melting skin bags grinding and writhing into my slowly disappearing self.
Were they having their last gasp at life at my expense!? The thought struck with surgical precision, and I could not shake it as tequila mixed with vomit bled down the back of my tongue. The presence of these creatures and how they were now filling their cracked and decadent cup with my fading essence filled me with a sublime horror and dread that coiled tighter with every passing second. I was lost in a sea of people, my sweat-soaked body writhing against a floor that seemed to breathe beneath me. The lights and the noises and the music blended together to melt the soul, or at least to whatever part of me still claimed to possess one.
Was I soulless or was it they?! Where did I end and where they begin? Was I them or they me? The faces blurred. The movements repeated. The distinctions dissolved entirely. What remained was something primal, something stripped of identity. An endless loop of sensation without meaning. I could not tell if I was witnessing the madness or generating it.
I only know this: it was Mexico, and I was lost, completely lost, in a sea of vulgar and depraved humanity.
