She tried to remember names and faces.
From a book she learned to associate names with mnemonic images:
Mike became a microphone, Lynn - a piece of lint,
James - a pile of gemstones. On the second day
the delicate mnemotechnic construction began to falter:
words would refuse to attach themselves to images
and stick directly to the people instead,
making them, in turn, devices to remember
strange selected pictures for which she no longer had use.