Editor’s note: Catch up on any chapters you’ve missed at www.mercurynews.com.
CHAPTER 8: ENTRA LA LENGUA
I was on a hunt with the Bay Area’s greatest detective to find a genius who was also the world’s most famous missing person.
We had discovered a plot hatched in a different timeline to collapse all possible Bay Areas into just one: the best of all possible worlds.
But this “best” wouldn’t include any of the cities we’d built here after we filled the bay. It would have no West Alameda, no Moletown, no Salt City. And it would have no Yerba Buena Zone, which was like saying it would be New York City without Manhattan, Tokyo without Shibuya.
Didn’t they realize what they’d be losing?
There was never any parking in the city on the bay, so Annabel Scheme and I took a taxi. It deposited us on a busy block of Barbara Lee Boulevard, smack in the middle of the boardwalk. Just ahead lay the dark water, the ghostly surge of the headlands, and between them, the stamp of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Yerba Buena Zone had taken root out here atop the barrier that ran from San Francisco to Oakland. In the beginning, the new city had perched on a bed of fill only half a mile wide, but through expansion both sanctioned and not, it had drawn itself like a curtain down the length of the bay. The end of one show; the start of another.
It was the Bay Area stirred and simmered, reduced to a thick sauce. There were taquerias, izakayas, falafel carts, dim sum palaces. City Lights had an outpost here, as did Google. Architecture students from Cal stumbled around, drunk on possibility. The Zone’s oldest buildings dated to the 1980s, but most were of more recent vintage: towering gemstone shapes built from mass timber and milky polycarbonate. Stepping onto the boardwalk was like traveling into the future.
Scheme saw me gawking. “You haven’t spent much time here, have you, Mr. Portacio?”
In fact, I’d only driven through the Yerba Buena Zone. The density intimidated me. I liked the bucolic sidewalks of Oakland better.
“First lesson, then. Where are we?”
Was this a trick question? We were in the Yerba Buena Zone.
“Incorrect! This is the YBZ, Yerb City, the Y-B. Never the Yerba… Buena… Zone. Nothing here is Buena. Now, what do you call a denizen of the YBZ?”
I had to plead ignorance.
“They are yerbs, all of them. Some yerbier than others.”
What was the marker of yerbitude?
“You’re catching on. A yerb is ingenious, ambitious and fearless. She wears a thick coat of fatalism… but give it a scratch and just underneath, you’ll find utopian dreams.”
Directly ahead was one of the original buildings from the 1980s, a squat cube, its windows tinted pink so they reflected a warm glow. This was the unimpeachably cool headquarters of Rose Quartz Records, the legendary label of Scheme’s quarry, the pop star tech genius Quintessandra.
Quintessandra was part of the first generation born in the YBZ, so improbably gifted that she could have been Steve Jobs or Beyoncé. She had chosen, instead, to be both. Her first album, which she produced, with its accompanying video game, which she programmed, had been the foundation stone of the genre now called yerbacore.
In the decade that followed, her music and her software alike had been crucial strands in the weave of global culture. But this year, there had been no new album, no new game. Six months ago, Quintessandra’s social media accounts had gone dark. She’d disappeared.
The boardwalk was filling with people. They emerged from their offices and looked to the sky, shading their eyes. Like a call to prayer. Like a grand civic ritual. Like lunch.
From the south came the boom of the burrito cannons, and in another moment, the flight of foil tubes appeared, rising, glittering above the YBZ, then falling, napkin-chutes deployed, vectored with perfect precision towards their targets.
Scheme had martial arts training, and she used it now: a viperous strike to snatch a falling burrito away from its intended recipient, Rumer Lee, president of Rose Quartz records, Quintessandra’s super-cool consigliere.
Lee goggled at Scheme. One did not simply snatch a yerb’s burrito out of the sky.
Scheme made introductions. She did not release the burrito.
“So you’re looking for Quin,” Lee said. “Join the club. There’s you, me, the music blogs, the paparazzi, and, oh, let’s see, about 60 million fans…” She ticked them off on her fingers, then reached for her burrito.
Scheme, who had martial arts training, hopped away. “This isn’t a publicity stunt? Tuck your star away, let the demand grow, then suddenly she’s back with a different haircut?”
Rumer Lee sighed. “I’m so hungry. Please.”
“You must know something,” Scheme said.
“You want a clue? Here’s a yerbin’ CLUE. Last week, some yerb tagged the front of my building.”
She showed us her phone: a snapshot of the Rose Quartz Records headquarters, tagged in giant angular letters, neon green — truly gruesome against the pink — that read: ENTRA LA LENGUA.
Was that some kind of slang?
“Her first album was titled ‘La Lengua,’” Lee said. “But I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Now the blogs all think I’ve got some secret album and this is the title. If there’s a secret album … it’s a secret from me, too. Can I have my burrito now?”
Back on Barbara Lee Boulevard, I told Scheme it seemed like we were no further than where we’d started.
She scoffed. “Will, how can you say that? We have a clue. ENTRA LA LENGUA.”
But we didn’t know if it was a taunt, or a riddle, or… maybe just some yerb writing a cool phrase on a building.
“It’s a clue, Will. Trust me. I know what a clue tastes like.”
She whirled and strode down the boulevard, incandescent with confidence, heading deeper into the YBZ. If anyone was yerby, it was Annabel Scheme.
Tomorrow, Part Nine: Shark Teeth (June 15)
