So, since so many people have said I should share the story, inciting others to be oh-so-curious about the eighth wonder of the world that is my laundry, I will now proceed to relate the ending of this story. As Jessajune said, at this point it can't help but be anti-climactic, but there it is.

For those of you who haven't read, or have forgotten, the first part of this story, I invite you to (re)read it.

So Monday I had brought my huge oversized bag full of dirty laundry to work for cleaning, and it was dubiously picked up that afternoon. Their policy is that simple 'wash and fold' laundry has a next-day turnaround, so it should be back on Tuesday. Of course, that doesn't take into account that I only authorized them to do one bagful, and that's a 'normal-sized' bag, not my uberbag.

Tuesday: No word. They're probably still trying to lift the thing.

Wednesday I get to work to find a voicemail from the laundry service. The woman asks why I didn't use the regular bags. you see, they have these specially sized laundry bags for this sort of thing, and you pay a $5 deposit per bag. (This is not nearly as god a deal as the $3 deposit I put on my nifty green stackable WebVan crate which, now that WebVan has gone belly up, is the permanent kitty-food and toys crate. But I digress...) The relevant point is that I had committed not only a faux pas by using my own bag, but one that apparently befuddled the laundry officer charged with my load. The good news (made all the more quaint because she thought it was the bad news) was that the normal bag (the 'red bag', to be differentiated from the ne'er again referenced '3 sinkful blue bag' I was shown when my 'gargantua' bag was picked up) was intended for 14-24 pounds of laundry, and my bag weighed in at 48 pounds, and so I would have to be charged $49.90 instead of the single-bag $24.95 price. What's more, they would give me a free red bag for next time (not quite sure why they didn't give me two, after witnessing my extreme laundry needs).

I call her back, assure her that the $49.90 is completely acceptable, and I am happy to receive their services and their red bag. She informs me that the laundry will be taken care of today (Wednesday) and returned to me tomorrow (Thursday). Three-day turnaround instead of one, but I don't mind.

Thursday morning I come in to work, making sure to drive, as 50 48 pounds of laundry (does laundry weigh less after being washed? Does the removal of dirt result in a smaller mass? And what about the lint?) is not what I want to bring on to Amtrak, along with my regular backpack.

Email, work, and morning meetings. I return to my cube with anything but laundry on my mind and I find... Three stuffed, white, tall kitchen garbage bags, double bagged, with the red pull-handles neatly tied into bows. The feeling-before-thinking part of my brain recalled that I have exactly the same bags at home (well, yellow pulls instead of red, but close enough) and the only time I would double-bag is if there was something particularly noxious inside that I wished to doubly insure against accidental escape, in much the same way that young lovers use a condom and the Pill, because sometimes 97% just isn't enough. But I digress...

After a poke, and a flashback to the Simpsons, when Marge and Homer are caught naked in the minigolf windmill ("feels like a hefty bag full of meat") and people are groping inside to figure out what's making the balls stuck ("maybe it's presents for all of us!") it dawns on me that, despite being in neither the gargantua bag, nor two 'red bags,' the contents of the three (six, really) garbage bags is, indeed, my laundry.

Like an old friend coming home from an unexpectedly long trip, I ripped open one of the bags to see it. Okay, that's a really inappropriate metaphor simile. Let's try that again: Like one would embrace an old friend returning from an unexpectedly long adventure, I strove to see, touch, and smell my laundry, to affirm its existence, and verify that the double-bagging was to protect this newly-revirginized clothing from the comparatively dirty outside world, rather than vice-versa, as was the case when last I saw my good friend.

Struggling with tie-handles drawn thin and tight by the weight they recently carried, finally I have the two bags of the first bundle open. I spy the tightly folded stack of shirts within, and bring my nose close for a good inhalation--

Let me once again break from the story for a second for a little necessary background: I love the smell of laundry, and others love (well, like. Well, actually, let's be fair, like, like, in the Jr. High gossip sense) the smell of my laundry in particular. I don't use dryer sheets. I don't use fabric softener. I don't separate my delicates (I don't think I have any delicates) from the rest. There's just two piles, white/light, and dark/bright, and each gets its own load. The Tide is my shepherd and I shall not want for another. (Or, to put it another way, for religious sensitivity: There is only one god Tide, and Procter & Gamble is its prophet.) Suffice it to say that the smell of my clean laundry is a comforting force in my life. Suffice it to say that I am a freak. But we knew that. Now, to continue:

I touch my laundry. I peek into the bag to see the nice, neat stacks. I bring my nose in to get a nice whiff of laundry smell, and I swivel my chair back to the monitor and go back to checking email.

...

About thirty seconds pass before I stop typing mid-sentence, and turn back to the bags. I go back to the opened bag, again smother my face past the plastic of the bags, take a sniff, sit back up, and return to my computer.

...

I stop again. This is strange. Did I smell my laundry? I remember the physical act of doing so. I remember doing it twice. Despite this, certain very specific olfactory nerves have gone unexcited, their G-protein reactions at the ready, but with no impetus to send their firings of pleasure into my brain. I remember the act of smelling, but not the consequence. I remember checking twice, just to be sure.

It's not that it didn't smell like my laundry should, it's that it didn't smell like anything.

Scratch that. Let me put it another way: Look at the air in front of you right now. Sure, you can't, because it's invisible, but you can see things through it. My laundry was not an olfactory analogy to transparency. Now picture a black hole. You can't see it, but even more so, you can't see past it, because it sucks up all the light around it (okay, smarty, a black hole isn't the perfect analogy, as light bends around it and there is no true 'black' spot. For you, imagine that there's a square meter of void in front of you, different than a vacuum because nothing exists within it, not even the photons looking for free passage through it. Essentially, a perfectly black cube).

The point I'm trying to make is that not only did the laundry not smell like anything but, nose in laundry, I couldn't identify any smells at all. Take a good deep breath through your nose right now and you can probably identify a few smells, or at least a general milieu of scent, be it office-y ozone or homey smells. Nose-in-bag there was nothing at all. The nothing was so strong, it even made even the memory of checking a weak and uncertain one.

I get off my chair and on my knees, in front of my laundry. Head inside the bags, nose in deep, an airtight seal (weird images of autolaundreic asphyxiation notwithstanding) I take a good long breath.

Nada. Nothing. Zip.

You know, wine connoisseur have ratings for just how good or bad specific kinds of vessels are for the purposes of wine tasting. Since the mouth and tongue can interact with the material of the vessel, it can therefore bias the taste of the contents as you sip. Glass is especially non-reactive. Leaded glass, crystal, even more so. This is why we have wine glasses. Plastic is a middlingly bad choice, making the contents taste a little stale. Wood captures earlier tastes, so wisps of the previous beverage (or detergent) may slip in with the wine. Metal is all bad, as its taste overpowers the subtleties of any beverage it carries.

Could it be that laundry simply isn't best appreciated while encased in polyurethane? The stuff is, after all, designed to trap the odors of refuse. Could it have trapped the spirit of my laundry as well?

I may never know where my laundry lost its scent and conjoined soul. Maybe it was while sitting in the scent-sucking bags, maybe it never survived the cleaning process, killed by harsh chemicals and sterile, allergy-free cleaning products. Maybe the soul drifted away when I sent the laundry off to be washed by another's hand.

Outsourcing my laundry seemed so efficient, but what is the true price?

...

Epilogue

A few loose ends:

• Back in my apartment, unpacking the three bags, I found both my original gargantua bag, nicely laundered, folded, and pressed. I also found a single 'red bag,' possibly a tacit message that 24 pounds of my laundry is all they care to handle at any given time.
• All my socks were nicely matched, except for two strays with no partner. It occurs to me that one could bring down the entire laundry system by taking advantage of this: If you give them one bag full of socks, each having one and only one unique mate, it's quite a lengthy task to find each pair. If you bring them two such bags, it would take quadruple the time to sort through them. This is an O(n^2) problem, where n is the number of socks. Given that the price to do the laundry is a linear, or O(n) problem, give then enough socks to launder and match and they could be driven out of business. Or at least they'd send goons to smack you around.
• Laundry can be reborn. Since the time that this story took place, I've had the opportunity to wear and wash several items in this story, and they come back from my own laundering rejuvenated, with no hard feelings.
• To this day, I can go into my chest of drawers, pull out an item, smell it, and tell whether its soul is intact.