Annika’s Dream
by Mitchell Near
Annika Poderovsky walked at a rapid clip east on Irving Street in the Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. Twenty feet ahead of her lay the six-lane roaring highway of 19th Avenue. She fixed her gaze on the green light beckoning her to cross and jogged the last fifteen feet to the intersection.
The light changed to yellow and then to red just as she reached the edge of the sidewalk. Annika lifted her right foot and stamped it down on the pavement. Damn! she thought. She would need to wait. Two minutes? Three minutes? It felt interminable.
Auto exhaust seeped into her nostrils and mouth. The thunder of car engines reverberated in her ears. She reached inside her black leather purse and pulled out her compact mirror. Her blue eyes gazed back at her. The eyeliner looked fine and the pale lavender lipstick still evenly covered her lips. The light remained red. She retrieved a comb and ran it through her shoulder length reddish-brown hair. The light remained red.
She returned her compact and comb to her purse and thought about Marcus. They’d been dating now for three months, and she knew that he was the one. Now was the time for marriage and a family. She remained girlish and lithe at age 34, but she wanted babies, and time was flying. Marcus was waiting for her at Tartine Bakery on 9th Avenue.
The light finally changed to green. She looked both ways before stepping out into the intersection, knowing that drivers often blew past the red light. It was all clear. Annika stepped quickly across the six-lane street. She looked straight ahead, preferring not to look at frustrated drivers, often staring at their cell phones. Almost there, she thought, as she approached the east side of 19th Avenue.
She stepped into the zone of the crosswalk directly in front of the final lane. Then, the driver of a red 2014 Porsche accelerated, heading north on 19th Avenue, oblivious to the red light and to the presence directly in front of his car of a young Russian-American woman walking with joyous anticipation to meet her lover.
Annika’s body flew six feet up into the air and ten feet out into the intersection. The driver continued north, turning his steering wheel to avoid the broken body lying on the street. As soon as he passed her breathless form, he accelerated down the street, never to be seen again.
She floated above her lifeless figure in a dreamlike body, her mind calm and detached, and peered down from above. Some drivers heading toward her body stopped, but others drove past her prone form. The traffic behind her bunched up, and a cacophony of honking horns ensued.
Four pedestrians standing on the sidewalk, a bit beyond the lane where she had been hit, took in the scene. A middle-aged woman wearing a blue pantsuit sat on the sidewalk and covered her face with her hands. A young mother embraced her ten-year old son as tears streamed down her face.
The fourth pedestrian, Annika noted as she hovered above the scene, was a young man standing on the sidewalk, tall and slender, with wavy black hair. His mouth agape as he looked at her physical body. He seemed to be in a state of shock, but she also sensed his love and compassion for her. Then, he vanished from the scene. She heard the wailing of an ambulance and then saw the ambulance stop in front of her body. Two male paramedics rushed out to examine her human remains.
There was nothing left to do for the human Annika. She had wanted to marry Marcus; she had wanted to have babies. For now, she must leave the earthly dimension. The people standing on the sidewalk, the cars, the street, all shimmered and dissolved into shards of light. Her awareness turned away from the earth, away from her life as Annika. She would return, in a different era, when she could safely walk through a city she loved and be a part of a family she treasured.
* * *
Alexei Ivanovich Nikolaev — or simply Sasha — and his wife Megan Halbury, walked everywhere. They walked south on 8th Avenue, up the hill, toward their arts-and-crafts style home in Forest Hill. A stream flowed along the middle of 8th Avenue. Olive trees, California lilacs, penstemons and salvias populated the banks of the stream. Wide sidewalks lined each side of the avenue. There was a bikeway and streetcar route on 9th Avenue, but on 8th Avenue, Sasha and Megan strolled home on a walking-only street, listening to the whispering gurgles of the gentle stream on a warm evening.
Sasha and Megan held hands. Earlier that evening, after sharing a dinner of Thai yellow curry, ginger snapper and a dessert of flourless chocolate cake, they had toasted in Valentine’s Day of 2100 with their friends Ralph and Francis at their spacious flat just across the street from Golden Gate Park. That is, Sasha, Ralph and Francis had celebrated with Mimosa cocktails, but Megan had refrained.
“Why did you skip the Mimosa?” Sasha asked.
“Champagne gives me a headache the next morning.”
“Didn’t you drink some champagne after our New Year’s Eve celebration? We toasted the arrival of 2100 just a few weeks ago.”
“Yes, I did, but I’ve learned not to since then.”
“I see.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes.
“2100,” Megan said. “Pretty amazing.”
“Yes, amazing. I remember the year 2000.”
Megan stopped, turned and looked at him. “Are you crazy? The year 2000? You’re only 30.”
“I remember reading about the year 2000. All that panic about the years stored as two digits in 1999.”
“And nothing happened,” she said as they continued their stroll home. “What I find amazing is that the very street we’re walking on used to be covered with cars.”
“I wonder what that looked like.”
“I can tell you. A couple of days ago, I was looking at some historic photos of San Francisco from the first part of the 21st century. The cars were everywhere: backed up on the streets, parked on the sides of the streets, parked in asphalt lots, parked in multi-story buildings devoted to the storage of cars, parked on the very sidewalks.”
“What a nightmare!” Sasha said. “And millions upon millions of people were killed in car crashes, many of them simply out and about walking.”
“How horrible!”
“And they called them accidents.”
“Accidents?” Megan said.
“The car crashes; they called them accidents. As if the insanity of surrendering our cities to the storage and movement of automobiles, to speeding metal and glass boxes was simply normal. Simply, a way of life.”
“Thank God that’s all over. I’m so grateful to be walking home with you and not even see one of those metal and glass boxes.”
* * *
There had been voices in the late twentieth century urging the transformation of cities into places for people. Places for walking. Places for transit and bicycling. Places where the streets belonged to the people. But those voices were overwhelmingly ignored.
After a series of massive fires in the 2010s and 2020s swept through Australia, the western United States, and the Mediterranean, those voices gained strength. And, in the 2030s, after the waters rose along the coastlines of the world and the cities of the world began to lose land, after some of those cities even disappeared from the face of the Earth, the movement for a new way of living strengthened and grew.
City governments began the process of converting their streets into walking promenades, streetcar corridors, bikeways, and linear parks suffused with native plants. In Europe, these changes were implemented quickly. In the United States, the transformation moved at a slower pace, but it did happen. The auto advocates spouted their nonsense about the freedom of driving, but a new vision had taken hold.
People who had never imagined living without an automobile, now moved around their cities without the burden of parking and protecting their cars. They strolled and ambled and sauntered along streets with their fellow citizens. In the spring, they smelled the scents of lilies and roses. They heard the songs of larks and nightingales. They listened to the susurrations of streams that had been entombed beneath asphalt. Their children played in the streets. And no one was killed by the deadly force of a careening automobile driven by a person ensconced inside the screens of their phones or driven by lines of code with the ineluctable bug in them.
This transformation, this rebirth, this resurrection of urban life was a convoluted process, with countervailing forces fighting to take back the city for the auto. It took many years to embody this great change, but by the year 2060, the automobile had been banished from the cities of the world.
* * *
Sasha awoke on the third Saturday in February and saw streams of sunlight filtering around the edges of the bedroom curtains. He turned his head from the south-facing window and studied the face of his sleeping wife. Her breaths came in a measured rhythm like the breeze washing over a mountain lake at dawn. Her long red hair curled around her cheeks.
Megan opened her eyes, blinked, and looked at Sasha looking at her. “Hello, beautiful,” she said. She reached out with her right hand and ran her fingers through his thick, black hair.
“You’re the beautiful one,” he said and paused for a moment. “Let me tell you a dream I just had.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’m standing on the east side of 19th Avenue, but rather than the street of wide sidewalks, bike lanes and streetcars with Monterey pine trees in the center, it’s a street covered with asphalt and a river of cars rushing along it both north and south. I smell the stink of auto exhaust and hear the roar of speeding cars. I’m overwhelmed by the noise, the smell, the palpable sense of danger and the sheer ugliness of the scene.”
“Sounds horrible!” Megan said as she drew the covers closer around her neck.
“It was. I look across the street, which seems to be a long way off, and I see a young woman. I sense that she wishes to cross the street to see me and I sense that she is one of my ancestors, a great-great aunt named Annika Poderovsky. The traffic light changes to green for Annika. If you remember your history, people on foot had to wait for these colored lights on steel poles to change before they could walk across the street.”
“Barbaric.”
“Yes, quite. So, Annika begins her walk across the chasm of the 19th Avenue intersection. The cars have stopped and lined up at the northern and southern edges of the intersection, but the lane closest to where I am is still empty. Annika walks quickly. She’s only a few feet from me now. I see her blue eyes and her smile. Then, suddenly, a red sports car speeds down the open lane and hits Annika.
“Her body flies five or six feet up into the air and is deposited, with a sickening crunch, onto the asphalt surface in the center of the intersection. I catch a glimpse of a portly, middle-aged man’s face contorted in fear and anger as he maneuvers his car past Annika’s body and speeds away. I stand there, my mouth hanging open, in a state of shock. Standing next to me is a mother embracing her son. She’s crying. And there’s a middle-aged woman sitting on the sidewalk covering her face with her hands. I feel sad and angry and horrified. But then, I let those feelings go and in their place, I feel love and compassion for Annika. Then I hear a voice, Annika’s voice.
“Her voice is sweet and calm. ‘Sasha,’ she says, ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you. I’ve been dreaming of my rebirth in a new time, a better time. I’ve been searching for good parents and I’ve noticed you and your wife. I’ve seen the love you share and the home you’ve created. I know you want children, and we are part of the same lineage. I will be your first child. Please tell your wife, my mother, that I will be arriving soon.’
“I’m overwhelmed with joy.”
Megan’s emerald eyes stared at Sasha and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, my God! Sasha!” she said. “I’ve been waiting for just the right moment to tell you my wonderful news.”
“Tell me now, Megan. My love.”
“I’m pregnant, Sasha. I’m pregnant.”
* * *
The devilish grins of carved pumpkins greeted Sasha and Megan as he pushed the stroller down the wide walking path on Castaneda Street. Ghosts of white sheets hung from front yard trees, cardboard black cats arched their backs along front stairways, aged witches in long black gowns sat astride green hedges. Megan walked beside Sasha, her hand gently touching his right elbow. And, in the stroller, a baby boy smiled at the two of them.
Sunlight shone through the yellow leaves of a Gingko tree as they strolled past it. Two of their neighbors, an older retired couple, approached them and looked, smiling, into the stroller. “And who is this?” said Jack.
“This,” Sasha said, fully straightening his back, “is Adrian. Adrian Alexeyevich Halbury-Nikolaev.”
“Quite a mouthful,” said Lena. “He is beautiful!”
Jack made cooing sounds and then asked the young couple, “Did you choose his sex? Or did you let nature take its course?”
“Adrian made all the choices,” Sasha said. “He knew us before he was born.”
Copyright © 2021 by Mitchell Near
