E M P T Y H O U S E S Caridad Cole When I sat up in a strange bed on the morning of the first day of 1967, I thought that I had finally adjusted. My surroundings, as unfamiliar as they were, felt strangely solid, like I could grab ahold of the room and claim it as my own. That’s all I wanted, to have a place and an identity of my own, to be the only one in my body. I wanted the splitting headaches to stop. The human-ailing crush of loneliness had been my only