Vinegar Syndrome

I didn’t expect it to work.

When I placed the worn photo of my mother and her long-gone sister under my pillow – a photo that had captured them at their most rebellious, most vivacious – some summer night in 1982 – I didn’t expect to be brought back to that very parking lot where the photo had been taken. And yet, that is where my story begins.

She was 19 then, and my aunt 23. It would be the last time my mother saw her sister alive: a night that would haunt her for the rest of her life, and in turn, would haunt me throughout mine. My mother was not a warm person. The rest of my extended family tells me that she used to be: that she used to be loving and larger than life, that she laughed louder than anyone in the room, that she was beautiful and magnetic. They tell me that the ‘she’ she used to be died that night, too, right along with her sister. They tell me they’re sorry for my loss even though I wasn’t born then, because maybe I could’ve had a red-lipped mother who smiled at me with bright white perfect teeth and who laughed with my infant gurgles, a melodic mother who soothed me when I cried as a child. I didn’t have that mother. Instead, I had my mother: a cold, hard woman who smoked Newports and flicked the butts throughout our apartment and paid me little mind.

I spent my life fixated on that night, the night in the photo. The night that took who could’ve been my mother away and left me with this shell of a woman to raise me. I’d seen an old video of it once: I had a penchant for digging around in places I didn’t belong, like my uncles attic. Not my real uncle – a close friend of my mothers who’d been there that night, who we visited often; whose home was filled with relics from a youth he tried desperately to cling onto. Posters of glam rock bands carelessly plastered on the walls of his garage and leather furnishing that made his admiration of biker culture very clear to visitors made for tacky décor throughout his home. He was the only person who I ever saw make my mother laugh, although even then, it was rather sardonic. On one of their whiskey nights, I wandered up into the attic, filled with dust and boxes and more boxes and books and old VHS tapes, and browsed the ones with handwritten labels; and I found one that had a label with no handwriting on it, laying on its back instead of vertically with its brothers. Probably some kind of filth recorded from the television after 1AM on one of those X-Rated channels no one pays for but tries to make out through the snow anyway. In that attic, he had an old, musty, perpetually damp couch with springs sticking out across from an old, box television set to play those old VHS tapes; and so, naturally, curious, starving for information and entertainment that did not belong to me, I decided to play the tape. I didn’t find filth; at least not the kind I was expecting – instead, a shaky video of a boy and his friends in a parking lot; film that had rotted away in the plastic casing of that VHS, leaving blotches in corners of the video, distorting the clues to their exact location and cutting off faces of friends that were perhaps long since forgotten. I watched, mesmerized; able to recognize my mother and her pouty, painted red lips and teased blonde hair, worn up, while she dragged on her Newport and laughed raucously at whatever someone near her was saying, jabbing her sister in the rib to, I imagine, elicit laughter from her, too.

It was odd to see my mother as a girl, then. She was 60 now but looked much worse for wear than she could’ve had she taken care of herself all these years. The girl on the screen was beautiful and lively and cool; my mother downstairs was dried and wrinkled and raspy and someone that coughed up phlegm and spit it wherever she pleased.

I became determined to go back there, somehow. I immersed myself in the study of film restoration and 80s history, in physics, in time travel, in the suspension of disbelief and most of all, in a misguided spark of hope.

I couldn’t tell you why it dawned upon me to freeze frame that shot of my mother and her sister and turn it into a photo to place under my pillow, as if it would summon a fairy to bring me to their world in that time and in that space: but I can tell you that that’s precisely what happened. And that’s where I am: watching her, watching her friends, her sister. The air smells of freshly pumped gasoline and is just crisp enough that I question how she could even be comfortable in that skirt with fishnets, such a stereotypical look for the rebel of her time. Her sister, dressed similarly, looks less comfortable. Tense.

Have you ever heard of vinegar syndrome? It is, essentially, the deterioration of film. It is what caused that home video to have messy blotches of empty space when I watched it. It is the, in technical terms, “catastrophic deterioration that occurs when the film breaks down.” It is precisely within that spot that I find myself: a black hole, an interdimensional wasteland, a secret place that lets me watch them without them watching me.

And as I marinate in this space, I somehow feel my own being quickly deteriorating: as if my very flesh is melting, as if my brain has developed the ability to shapeshift from a rounded pink mass into sharpened blades that grind against my now ever-changing skull; and it’s so fast and so overwhelming and so freezing cold and burning hot all at once, and the smell – the smell of rotting, of vinegar, of some warped attempt at preservation; and I need to run. And my brain, in its malformed yet commanding transmission, lunges me forward; forward, toward my mother, toward her sister. I lunge and engulf her within the black hole I find that I myself have become and I’m so acidic I digest her, my mothers sister, in a matter of seconds, with no ability to form an idea as to why it must be her, but it must be. She belongs in the liminal space between film and the world, and I don’t know why -

And then I’m awake.

In my bed.

The photo is gone.

And the video, paused, shines back at me in my still-dark bedroom with film strips strewn around the floor, and I see the frozen frame, rotted, paused. A shadow stands beside my mother. The film there has deteriorated.