A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

She falls asleep reciting the lines over and over to herself.

  At last, someone who understands

  She is not free, she realizes that. Freedom consists in having some control over one’s transactions with the world outside oneself, and this is denied to her. She cannot reach the controls of the holovision chamber to call people up, to order goods, to seek information or guidance, to go on holiday—to determine her life in any of the ways in which free people can. All she can do is watch the abstract images provided for her—Therapeutic Sequences Numbers 3, 5, 7, 7b, 7c, 11, and D4, as the labels on them announce. She cannot even turn them off. The only way she can escape the therapy is by going to sleep, or by concentrating on the graffiti on the wall. Querin quo requi assandi/Curaquod semnilo sas … The lines go round and round inside her head, until they become as hypnotic as the images in the chamber.

  Every now and then the images fade and a head of one sort or another takes their place. The heads ask Uncumber a number of questions, such as, “Quin quasilya fos endi requiquestos?” and “Sessera quoston orana qua tengui, nil qua bonu approproquila?” In reply she can only shake her head helplessly, which satisfies some, irritates others, and eventually drives all away.

  Hours or days pass; without the usual time checks on the holovision, there is no way of knowing. Then finally a head of a different sort appears on the screen, a sympathetic and important head, a head that speaks Uncumber’s language. At any rate, every time it opens its mouth Uncumber hears her language spoken, though the movements of the mouth and the sounds that emerge seem to have no relation to each other.

  “Hello,” it says, smiling. “Have I got this damned translating machine switched on to the right language?”

  Uncumber nods, too surprised to speak. To hear her own language spoken again! She’s almost forgotten what it sounded like. Even on lips which are clearly forming the syllables of some other language altogether, even emerging standard unit by standard unit from the depths of some machine, it sounds so warm and familiar and ordinary that she almost weeps.

  “All right,” says the head. “Well, my name’s Omacatl. What’s yours?”

  “Uncumber.”

  “Uncumber! That’s a pretty name. Isn’t she the lady who grew a beard to preserve her chastity?”

  Uncumber is astonished at this; she has never met anyone before who knew.

  “Oh, I know a lot of things!” says Omacatl roguishly. “You’d be surprised! Well, Uncumber—or may I call you Cumby?—I think you and I are going to get on quite well. Don’t you?”

  “Well … yes, I suppose so—”

  “I’m sure we shall. Now, Cumby, I’m a decider, among other things. Do you know what that is?”

  “Oh, yes, my father’s a decider.”

  “Is he indeed? Well, well. Then you know that I don’t literally decide things myself—by ear, as it were. I have a little machine to do that for me. What I have to do is to present the case to the machine; and I think I may say without boasting that the machine leans quite heavily upon my judgment. So now, to decide your case, I must obviously ask you one or two questions—”

  But Uncumber can’t understand this at all. “What case?” she demands. “What is there to be decided? All I want to do is to start deciding things for myself again.”

  Omacatl looks rather reproachful at this. “Cumby, Cumby!” he says, or the machine says. “You were found breaking into a house, robbing it, and murdering its inhabitants—”

  “No, no—”

  “Yes, yes! You were in the company of known sad men.”

  “Known what?”

  “Unfortunates—men with a long record of unhappy behaviour. Now what I have to decide is, first, whether you yourself are unhappy in this respect; secondly, if so, how unhappy you are; and thirdly, what the best treatment would be for making you happy.”

  Uncumber is so astonished and outraged that she doesn’t know where to begin to explain.

  “But I wasn’t helping the sad men!” she cries. “I’d been captured by them! Well, at any rate, I was lost in the forest, and they found me—”

  “Exactly,” says Omacatl gently. “You’ve got all sorts of circumstances you probably want taken into account. So you see, there’s an awful lot of deciding to be done, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Now, you say your father’s a decider, a member of the inside classes. And yet somehow you were lost in the forest. Now, why don’t you start right at the beginning, Cumby, and tell me exactly what happened?”

  So she does. Resentfully at first, because she can’t help being angry at the ridiculous assumptions which Omacatl seems to have made about her already. But he listens so sympathetically, shaking his head, clicking his tongue (or making the translating machine click its tongue), and murmuring, “I know, I know,” in so exactly the right places that she finds herself warming to the task and telling him everything—how cross-grained and obstinate she was at home; how she saw Noli on the holovision and fell in love with him and left home to find him; how terrible it was at the palace, and how hopeless her relations with Noli became. So engrossed does she become in the story that she starts to laugh at some of the ridiculous situations she got into with Noli, and almost to weep at other points. Omacatl smiles at her laughter, and looks cast down at her distress.

  “Oh, Cumby!” he cries when she’s finished. “You have had some adventures, haven’t you!”

  She nods silently, helplessly grateful for his sympathy.

  “Well, let’s get all this checked. What’s your mother’s number?”

  Uncumber stiffens at once.

  “I don’t think I want you to go calling up my parents,” she says. “We didn’t get on—I ran away. I want to go back on level terms, not be brought back like, well, like a little child who’s wandered into the outside world and can’t get back in again.”

  “Now, Cumby, be reasonable. I must let them know that you’re safe and sound.”

  “Well, I’m not going to give you the number, and that’s that.”

  Omacatl sighs. “All right,” he agrees. “Let’s leave that for a moment, and start with your friend Noli. What’s his number?”

  “It was 515,” she starts confidently. “515 … 515 …”

  But she can’t remember the rest of it. It’s entirely gone out of her head!

  “It was 515-something,” she says lamely.

  “Everything round here is 515-something,” replies Omacatl gently. “Haven’t you got the number written down somewhere? Surely you wouldn’t have set out from your parents’ home without writing Noli’s number down?”

  Of course! She did indeed write it down, and the piece of paper is still in the pocket of the rags she was wearing in the forest!

  And the rags, as she remembers as soon as she has jumped off the couch to find them, are in the waste-disposer, pulped and gone hours or days since.

  “Oh, Cumby!” says Omacatl reproachfully.

  “I can’t help it! It’s not my fault!”

  Now it’s Omacatl’s turn to be shocked. “It’s not a question of anybody’s fault, Cumby. No one’s suggesting it is. It’s just a matter of finding out what led up to your being found on the scene of the unhappiness—whether you really were lost, or whether the whole life-story you’ve told me was just a fantasy from beginning to end. We have to know exactly what sort of unhappiness you’re suffering from.

  “Then we shall see if we can treat it.”

  More fun with numbers

  Omacatl is incredibly patient with her. It’s not easy to look Noli up in the records, of course, since everyone is listed under either his number, which Uncumber can’t remember, or his surname, which she never knew. Omacatl’s machines do their best to work it out backwards; they find 397 Nolis in 515, none of them officially credited with a red pate, or three wives, or any of the other details Uncumber can recall. And as she is forced to admit, she’s not sure it isn’t spelt “Naoli,” or “Nohli,” or “Nholi.” Pressed by
Omacatl, she realizes that it could just possibly be “Moli”—or “Maoli,” or “Mohli,” or “Mholi.” Or even “Nowli.” Or “Mowli.” Or …

  Omacatl has a specialist examine her unconscious memory with the aid of all the right medicaments; but though he finds a great deal of interesting lumber there whose existence she had never even suspected, Noli’s number doesn’t seem to have got down that far. Omacatl arranges for her to go up in a travelling house and scan the ground beneath in the holovision chamber. But the forest looks unimaginably different from above. Noli’s palace was on the coast, of course, but, as she discovers, 515 is an island, with a complicated set of headlands and peninsulas, so that there is not one simple coastline to search along but several. Her muddle makes her nervous, and she positively identifies several settlements which turn out to be entirely wrong when they actually land to examine them. When at last they do find the right one, the Kind People in charge of the operation have ceased to take her seriously.

  “Yes, yes, this is the place!” she cries, gazing round at the dusty avenues and overgrown terraces where she was so free and so unhappy, surprised at quite how familiar and ordinary they seem.

  “Quelos quo malilya?” the Kind People ask her sceptically, looking at one another.

  “I don’t know—but this is the right place,” she insists.

  She takes them up the familiar stone staircase and into the palace. “Hello!” she cries to all the various queens and children they pass. But they give no sign of recognizing her! They look first at her and then at the Kind People, and then their bare eyes go dead and remote. Not a word do they say.

  Uncumber takes the Kind People up the wooden stairs to Noli’s room. The sour smell that wafts out as she opens the door! If only she could make them feel the profound and melancholy echo that awakens in her! And there are the cook-queen and the surprised queen, hovering as ever over their cooking and washing!

  “Look!” she says. “I’m back!”

  But look as they may, they give not the slightest sign of recognition. They look at her, they look at the Kind People with her, and they say nothing.

  “It’s me! Uncumber!” she cries. “Just tell these Kind Men you’ve seen me before, that’s all! They won’t hurt you! I’m the one who’s in trouble, not you!”

  But they just stare at her and at the Kind People, and say not a word.

  “Listen,” she says desperately to the Kind People, “I slept on that bed over there! I used to share it with the third queen, the thin one—the one who isn’t here at the moment.”

  It’s useless, of course. She turns to the queens.

  “Noli!” she begs. “Where’s Noli?”

  They stare at the floor.

  “Please! Noli! Noli!”

  “Nek taomoro Noli,” mutters the cook-queen at last.

  “Quere Nolisti pereques,” translates one of the Kind People to the others. They all laugh.

  “Nek taomoro Noli,” repeats Uncumber desperately. “I know what that means! It means Noli’s at work! I’ll show you where he works.”

  But the Kind People have finally lost patience. They take her back to the travelling house. She shouts and weeps and waves her arms, but they pay no attention; they are exceedingly weary of her.

  “Well, Cumby,” says Omacatl when he sees Uncumber back in her room again. “We’ve done our best. But we don’t seem to have got very far, do we?”

  “But we found the palace!” she cries. “We found where Noli lives! Please believe me, Omacatl!”

  “Just Catl, Cumby.”

  “Well, we did, Catl! We found it!”

  Omacatl gazes at her thoughtfully for a long time, rubbing his finger back and forth over the bridge of his dark glasses. Then he sighs.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing for it, Cumby,” he says, “but to start right from the other end of the business. You’ll just have to give me your home number and let me check with your parents. Won’t you, Cumby?”

  Uncumber lies on her couch for a long time, saying nothing, filled with resentment and despair. “I suppose so,” she says finally, sighing.

  “There’s no other way to fit you back into your slot in the world. Is there, Cumby?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “So, what’s the number?”

  “It’s …”

  A terrible freezing numbness seems to creep through her, obliterating the inside of her head in an icy white fog and then creeping down to her heart.

  “It’s …”

  She shivers.

  “I can’t remember,” she whispers.

  Don’t think of this as punishment

  “The machine’s decided your case, Cumby,” Omacatl tells her one day. “And very reasonably, I think. It feels that there is a quite considerable degree of unhappiness involved here, and that the best chance of treating it is to re-establish you one way or another in the inside world. You’re a displaced insider; I think that’s as clear as anything can be. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to ship you up to 965 and slot you into a small inside house in a development we have going up there. We’re going to slot you back into the world, Cumby. Pleased?”

  “But—”

  “965–402–003–949–335, to be precise. How does that sound? Cosy?”

  “But why should I be punished?” cries Uncumber. “Why should I be forced to go and live in 965? I’m not guilty, I haven’t done anything!”

  Omacatl smiles sadly. “‘Guilty,’ ‘punished’; this is a funny way to talk,” he says. “We don’t think in terms of guilt and innocence. We just ask: are you happy, or are you unhappy, so far as the evidence indicates? So don’t think of this as punishment, Cumby. It’s just the opposite. It’s to make you happy!

  “So off you go, Cumby, and start a marvellous new life up there in 965!”

  Something in the air

  So off she goes, along the filthy airways, in rockets full of uncouth outsiders travelling to and from construction sites and the world’s various harvests, to 965. She has no choice in the matter; when the Kind People open her door, it opens into their travelling house; when the door of the travelling house opens, it opens into the rocketport. And so on—each small section of the inside world opening inevitably into the next, through 006 to 131, and 131 to 965, and 965 to 965–402, until she arrives at last in 965–402–003–949–335.

  A perfectly agreeable house it is, too. It contains only one room, but that room is scarcely distinguishable from her room at home. Soft floor, soft walls; couch, holovision chamber; all the usual supply and disposal mains. And, as Omacatl says when, within minutes of her arrival, he appears in the holovision chamber to welcome her, she can always add more rooms when she starts a family or marries. He will be on hand whenever she requires him, at the touch of a switch, to help her decide about taking up her studies again, to help her settle on a career, to help make all the various social and emotional relationships around which her life will be arranged.

  So, constructively and optimistically, her life of rehabilitation and reintegration at 965 begins. At first her old rebelliousness asserts itself. She resents what she sees as a lack of freedom; though when Omacatl asks her in what way she lacks freedom, she can’t tell him. She has full control of the holovision, can order whatever she likes to be sent, can walk out if she wants to. For some time she thinks she might try walking out. But where could she possibly go? And remembering her days in the forest, she expresses her frustration by hammering harmlessly on the upholstered walls instead. Once, in a particularly sullen rage, she manages to kick the holovision chamber to bits with her bare feet. She has to wait three days before she hears the sound of the outsiders repairing it. They are days of the most appalling nothingness, and she doesn’t repeat her vandalism.

  Gradually, in any case, her rebelliousness wears off. She suspects that there is something in the air which is supplied to the house, some constituent that calms and reconciles the resistant mind and brings it into harmony with the universe.
At first she is infuriated by the idea of being reconciled to the world without her consent, just as she was as a child, but before many weeks have passed she finds she has become reconciled to the prospect of reconciliation. And is reconciled even to the fact that she is reconciled to it.

  So a new Uncumber really is emerging. She accepts Omacatl’s suggestion that she should take up the study of Archaic Botany again and lets him interest her in the idea of an academic career. Reconciliation saturates her; she even becomes reconciled to the memory of Noli. He comes to seem like some lover in legend. Their incompatibility melts; her return visit to the palace with the Kind People turns into an elegiac coda to the affair. And with Noli sealed securely off in this satisfying model of the past, she finds that the way is opened to enjoy an entirely straightforward sexual arrangement with Omacatl. She lies for hours at a time, suitably medicated, beside his image on the holovision, and there’s really nothing complicated or disagreeable about it at all, though she sometimes feels that the discrepancy between the movements of Catl’s lips and the sounds emerging from them will always remain a very slight barrier between them.

  “I suppose you make arrangements with all the women you’re counselling, do you?” she asks.

  “They usually find it rather helpful,” he replies. “I don’t think it would be terribly satisfactory as a permanent solution, of course. But as an interim stage, as a first step towards the network of social, emotional, and sexual relationships which we build towards in order to complete their rehabilitation, it can meet a need.”

  Years go by.

  Now Uncumber sees it this way. “It was the claustrophobic atmosphere of life at home that I was rebelling against. It was the suffocating network of my family’s social, emotional, and sexual relationships around me that was choking me. Now I’ve escaped from them into a completely new network of social, emotional, and sexual relationships, designed purely to serve my own needs, there’s nothing at all to stop me being perfectly happy and well integrated.”