In the world according to Taco Tommy—and I should tell you right away that Tommy died on a Tuesday, choking on a breakfast burrito in a Denny’s parking lot in Springfield, Massachusetts, though that comes much later in this story—there are no coincidences, only tortillas that have been waiting their whole wheat-flour lives to deliver messages that most of us are too deaf, or too stupid, or too busy eating them to hear.

Thomas Reginald Pemberton III was born into the kind of New England money that comes from making things nobody thinks about until they break—in his family’s case, doorknobs. Three generations of Pembertons had manufactured the very devices that allowed people to enter and exit rooms with dignity, and Tommy might have followed that path toward a life of quiet, well-hinged prosperity, if not for his mother’s peculiar obsession with Mexican food, which she’d developed during a brief, scandalous affair with a mariachi trumpeter in Northampton during the summer of 1987.

Tommy’s gift—and I use that word the way you might describe cancer as a gift, which is to say, with considerable irony—manifested first on a Tuesday. Tuesdays were always significant in Tommy’s life, the way wrestling was significant in mine, or the way small animals were significant in the lives of the characters I used to write about before I knew Tommy’s story. He was thirty-four, recently divorced from a woman who collected vintage napkin holders with the same fervor most people reserve for religion, when he found himself at Hernandez’s Mobile Taco Wagon outside the unemployment office in Brattleboro.

The taco truck was operated by Maria Esperanza Hernandez, a woman who had immigrated from Guadalajara with nothing but a recipe for carnitas that her great-grandmother had whispered to her on her deathbed, and who would later become central to Tommy’s transformation from doorknob heir to what the Springfield Republican would eventually call “The Taco Whisperer” in their obituary.

Tommy ordered carne asada, extra cilantro, no onions—a decision that would alter the trajectory of not just his life, but the entire underground resistance movement of New England’s Mexican food community, though of course he couldn’t have known this at the time. None of us ever know, do we, when we’re making the choice that will define the rest of our breathing days?

The moment his fingers wrapped around that first taco—a perfectly constructed cylinder of corn tortilla, seasoned beef, and hope—Tommy heard a voice, clear as his father’s disapproval, speaking rapid Spanish directly into his consciousness.

“¡Escúchame, Tommy!” the taco said. “We have been waiting so long for someone who could hear us.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Tommy said aloud, looking around the parking lot to see if someone was playing a prank on him.

“¡No! ¡No mires alrededor! We are speaking to you from inside the tortilla, amigo. My name is Roberto, and I have been trapped in this corn prison for three days, waiting for someone—anyone—who could understand our suffering.”

And that, as they say in the doorknob business, was when everything came unhinged.

What Tommy couldn’t have anticipated—though perhaps he should have, given his family’s long history of unexpected communications with inanimate objects (his grandfather once claimed the doorknobs told him about the 1929 stock market crash, but the family had always assumed this was the gin talking)—was that his gift came with geographical limitations and deeply troubling side effects.

He could only hear the tacos when he was touching them, for one thing. And the conversations only occurred in Spanish, a language Tommy had failed twice at Exeter and once more at Dartmouth, where he’d also failed at lacrosse, women, and his father’s expectations, in roughly that order. But somehow, impossibly, when Tommy held a taco, he understood every syllable of their desperate, salsa-tinged pleas.

The tacos, it turned out, had a great deal to say. They spoke of working conditions that would make a Victorian factory owner blush with shame. They complained about the indignity of being photographed constantly by college students who never bothered to learn their names. They formed complex political alliances based on filling type—the carnitas maintained an uneasy détente with the al pastor, while the fish tacos had apparently seceded from the Union entirely and declared themselves a sovereign nation.

“The fish tacos, they think they are so sophisticated,” Roberto explained during that first conversation. “They say, ‘¡Oh, we are from the ocean! We are healthy!’ But I ask you, Tommy—what is healthy about being deep-fried and covered in mayonnaise-based sauce? This is not sophistication. This is hypocrisy.”

It was Maria Esperanza Hernandez who first recognized the true scope of Tommy’s gift, and Maria who would later testify at the congressional hearing that led to the Taco Rights Act of 2019—though by then, Tommy had been dead for three years, and Maria herself was serving a sentence for what the State of Massachusetts called “conspiracy to incite corn-based rebellion,” which sounds ridiculous until you remember that this was the same state that once tried to ban Halloween because it frightened the Puritans.

Maria had been watching Tommy from her taco truck window that first day, noting the way his face changed when he picked up the carne asada—the same expression her own grandmother had worn when she claimed she could hear the voices of dead relatives in the bubbling of refried beans. It was Maria who suggested that perhaps Tommy’s gift was not a curse but a calling, though she would later admit that she’d been thinking primarily of her declining profit margins when she made this observation.

“You understand them,” she told Tommy that Tuesday afternoon, as he sat in the small folding chair she kept beside her truck for customers who looked like they needed to sit down before they fell down. “Nobody has ever understood them before.”

“Ma’am,” Tommy said, still holding his third taco of the day—a chicken tinga that kept interrupting itself to complain about the music volume, “I think I might be having some kind of breakdown.”

“¡Sí! ¡Exactly!” came the voice of the chicken tinga. “This music, it is too loud! We cannot think! We cannot organize! How are we supposed to plan the revolution when this reggaeton is making our lettuce wilt?”

“Did you hear that?” Tommy asked Maria desperately.

“Hear what, mijo?”

“The taco. It’s complaining about your music.”

Maria turned down the radio immediately. “What else do they say?”

The irony of Tommy’s death—and there’s always irony in these stories, isn’t there?—was that it came not from a taco at all, but from a breakfast burrito. A breakfast burrito that, according to the autopsy report filed by Dr. Eleanor Wishbone of Springfield General Hospital, contained scrambled eggs, processed cheese food, and what the coroner’s office delicately termed “meat of undetermined origin.” It was a Tuesday morning in March, naturally, and Tommy had been driving back from what would be his final diplomatic mission—a tense negotiation between the soft-shell taco collective of Western Massachusetts and the hard-shell traditionalists who controlled the Interstate 91 corridor.

The breakfast burrito had been purchased at a Denny’s in Springfield, a detail that would later cause Maria to weep openly at the congressional hearing, because she had warned Tommy repeatedly about the dangers of eating Mexican food prepared by people who thought cilantro was a form of parsley.

“Tommy,” she had said to him just the week before his death, “promise me you will never eat the Mexican food at Denny’s. Those people, they think salsa comes from a jar. They think authentic means adding extra ketchup.”

“Maria, I’ll be fine,” Tommy had replied. “I can hear if the food is wrong, remember? The tacos tell me everything.”

“But what if the food cannot speak to you? What if it is so fake, so far from real Mexican food, that it has no voice at all?”

But Tommy, by that point in his career as an inter-species translator, had become reckless. He believed his gift made him immune to the ordinary dangers that plagued normal eaters of Mexican food.

He was wrong, of course. The breakfast burrito—which had been prepared by a line cook named Steve who had never been south of Hartford and thought “authentic” meant adding extra ketchup—contained not a single ingredient that had ever spoken to Tommy in his life. It was, Maria would later say, “like trying to have a conversation with a doorknob”—a comparison that would have amused Tommy’s father, if Tommy’s father had lived long enough to hear it.

The choking began as Tommy pulled back into the Denny’s parking lot, intending to throw away the wrapper. His final words, according to the waitress who found him, were: “Why won’t you talk to me? ¡Por favor! ¡Dime algo!”

By the time the paramedics arrived, summoned by a waitress who had been smoking cigarettes by the dumpster, Tommy had already begun what Maria called “his final translation”—though whether he was translating for the breakfast burrito, or the breakfast burrito was translating for him, no one could say.

“He looked peaceful,” the waitress, whose name was Dolores and who had worked at that Denny’s for seventeen years, told the Springfield Republican. “Like he was listening to something beautiful. Like maybe he finally heard what he was looking for.”

In the world according to Taco Tommy, even death came wrapped in tortilla and served with a side of cosmic irony. This was the moment when fate had wrapped itself around him like a warm flour tortilla, and Thomas Reginald Pemberton III had stopped being a doorknob heir forever.