Yes, I do. My job - or rather, my grave responsibility, is insuring the quarrel and eventual end of the love of the most romantic couples. You will be curious how I got my job. I don't know the answer. I remember - in the briefest nanosecond after my death, standing on a platform somewhere near Sag Harbor, looking at a woman flickering in the window of the moving train; I was sore with both the pain and the fear of it; I was like a mute, blind pregnant woman in the very last second; and then I knew.
I never take the train. I don't feel worthy too. I walk, instead, from station to station, looking for the upturned eyes, the smile, the sweet young smell of love. I hover above it. Soon my work is done. I never asked myself how or why it works that way.
I know the point in my former life in which I doomed myself to haunt this system. I was sitting on the train myself, a simple student commuting from Long Island. I looked out at the neighborhood of the Western part of Queens. I saw a young Hispanic girl hanging laundry on her roof, and I smiled at her. I felt a pain, and the depth of its intensity was matched only by the briefness of its duration; I may have passed out. It was only a second, and yet it was as if it had never come. I don't know what was in my mind that day, or what it is I did; I only know that I condemned myself to this. I walk in the rain from station to station, hoping to doom lovers.
My best friend haunts elevators in Shanghai; specifically, he sees an elevator with the largest number of bored and impatient riders and begins dancing. Sometimes he dances an African dance, sometimes he does a Flamenco; the happiness which he gives to people pains him as much as the misery I give to my charges.
He himself knows better than I do what doomed him to this task: a moment of happiness not shared a choked up pleasure; but whoever heard of punishment for such a brief moment of sadness?