I'm not even sure if Kyle knew what his name was. He first met him outside his college waiting for a bus. The man in the leather jacket stopped and asked Kyle if he was local and if he could give directions.
Somehow, Kyle ended up walking with the man to show him. Whatever happened on the 10 minute walk, Kyle met the men the following evening.
It turned out that the man was also living locally, and hadn't actually needed directions, but it was a way of making a connection. Over the following week, Kyle was going round to the man's apartment each evening after college. He'd been targeted. Chosen and gathered up by the man as one of his current projects. Each visit, Kyle fell deeper and deeper under the man's influence. What was going on in Kyle's head can't be explained, but each evening Kyle would turn up and follow the same routine, kneeling on the floor before where the man sat, and would receive the first Marlboro Red between his lips as the man gazed into Kyle's eyes.
Kyle told his parents that he was studying in the evenings with one of his mates from college, without saying who it was. Instead, he was kneeling on the floor of a stranger's apartment as the man fed him cigarettes and spoke to him... speaking in a low and hypnotic voice about Marlboro.
Kyle would spend his day looking at the time, yearning for the moment he would step out of the college grounds and rush to his new mentor who'd be waiting for him, knowing Kyle would push the door, unlocked ready for Kyle to enter for that evening's hour long indoctrination.
It had begun with a fascination with the man's gaze and an inexplicable feeling of trust and reassurance. Within 10 days, the man's gaze and voice had become just the channel for what Kyle had come to focus on... Marlboro. From being the 'respectable' and polite young man who first walked into the man's apartment, he had transformed into a writhing jelly at the man's feet; the fetishization of Marlboro building as Kyle eagerly and desperately repeated the phrases the man instructed as Kyle smoked deep and hungrily, as if nothing else mattered in this state of overwhelming pleasure. "Marlboro is everything to me". "I live for Marlboro." "I belong to Marlboro". I worship Marlboro"... All Kyle's barriers had been broken down.
Within a month, the man had fully processed Kyle; Marlboro really was all that mattered to him. Kyle was ready to be passed on to the next level of being assimilated into the Cult.
We don't know what happened to Kyle, other than that he finished his studies and moved out of his family home to share with a new friend he'd been introduced to at the Marlboro Youth Club. That will have been his own decision. But his decisions were now fundamentally influenced by his new family.
The man filled Kyle's hour with another new project, amongst the other projects that visited his apartment over the hours of his evenings.
