Excerpt: In Two Halves

“Man is not truly one, but truly two.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Prologue

“It is a force as inevitable as the passage of time, or the fact that the rain must eventually follow the sunlight, a power as unstoppable as the weather wearing down the mountain, or God’s Wrath. It affects us in our everyday lives, and haunts us like an oncoming storm. It is a blessing, a curse, both beautiful and vulgarly crude. It is the single most important natural occurrence to act upon us, yet as a species, we know surprisingly little about it.
“I speak of course, of the process known as ‘Division’. The process that, even before birth, carves a human soul in two, tears it asunder and renders it divided. We split ourselves, for unknown reasons, into the Bona, (or ‘Good’ persona), and the Malfa, (the ‘Bad’ persona). One soul, split between its two, identical bodies, vessels for a divided consciousness. The Bona half of the consciousness will receive the elements of humanity known to us as peace, order, clarity and heart. The Malfa consciousness exudes conflict, chaos, confusion and rebellion. Though these consciousnesses may become muddled, as the Malfa is capable of good, as the Bona is of evil, inherently, their minds are divided as such.
“Yet, how, through such virulent separation, is the bond between the souls maintained. We know that the Bona and Malfa are separate parts of the whole, through the workings of another of life’s great mysteries, and greatest enemy, death. When we die, inexplicably, our counterpart suffers the same gristly fate. The connection between ourselves is still strong enough to cause fatal trauma to both elements simultaneously, making all of humanity individuals, with individual elements. We come in pairs.
“The Bona and the Malfa are in a delicate balance. Without one, the other cannot survive. The good cannot oust the evil, just as the evil relies on its own good to survive. We have evolved ourselves a Catch-22, a requirement in our own opposite. We are, as a species, a complete oxymoron. We are chaotic good, benevolent evil.
“This one fact, so integral to our society, is also the greatest mystery we as a species have. That is why it has become my life’s work to discover the answer to the question that has plagued us for countless generations. A question so simple, it is all the more frustrating that an answer is so unreachable. The question is this.
“Why?”