About three years ago, when I was traveling on a book tour, my cell phone broke.
How can anyone survive without this machine?
I was three thousand miles from home and would be gone for more than a week before popping back in to Southern California. I figured me not having a phone would worry my family, but my choices for where I could go to replace it (the phone, not my family) were limited to whatever was within walking distance from my hotel. So I ended up getting a new phone—one with a number on it that leads people to conclude I live three thousand miles away from where I actually live, which is kind of cool, if you ask me.
The other thing about the phone is that its number used to belong to two different people I do not know, but who I get calls and text messages for all the time. One of those people is named Billy Hinman.
I started getting so many phone calls and messages for Billy Hinman while writing this book in 2015 that I decided to make him a character in Rabbit & Robot. True story: When I was working on editing this book with David Gale at Simon & Schuster, while sitting at my keyboard on the morning of September 6, 2017, I even got another phone call for Billy. It has to be some kind of sign.
Also, Billy, I think you owe a lot of people a lot of money.
On the bright side, you got trapped inside one of my books. One of these days maybe our paths will cross. We will go out for drinks, maybe get tattoos together. At the very least we’ll take a selfie and trap the ultimate expression of what we’ve become as human beings on a phone that is forever haunted by your life.
So thank you, Billy Hinman, for coming to me as you did.
There are two people I know who are the best examples, I think, of what it means to be a human being. People who are really good at being human beings are never aware of how good they are, so I should point it out—in envy, and also as an admission of my own shortcomings in that endeavor. First and always, my love, my wife, Jocelyn, who is so perfectly not a machine; and second, my friend Amy King, to whom this book is dedicated.
You both make being human look so dang easy.
And, Billy, if you’re out there, text me.