Migrants’ journeys are often characterized by immobility and waiting. This chapter describes the experiences of migrants at a house in Libya as they prepare to take a boat to Europe. Furthering analyses of mobility economies, it brings economy into conversation with questions of time and immobility. The chapter reveals how a clandestine economy surrounding mobility intersects with intimate economies that reproduce the mobile body.

The success of legal time in migration law is exemplified by the multitude of possibilities to differentiate, categorize, and calculate human life by means of time. This is based on an intricate play between two complementing and contradicting forms of time: human time and clock time. The success of clock time in law can be related to its objective character, which allows for quantification and calculation. It is this quantification that provides a clarity and logic to processes that are otherwise rather intangible. It is the transformation from an individual process of human time into quantifiable, calculable chunks of clock time that enables the simple, general application in law. An extra value of this generality is its visibility, it is easy to demonstrate that a certain policy has changed based on clock time. However, legal time cannot be equated with clock time, the reference to time in law is always the time of someone, and therefore it is characterized by temporality. The virtues of legal time can be seen at work in several temporal differentiations in migration law: differentiation based on temporality, deadlines, qualification of time, and procedural differentiation.

One answer to the questions posed at the end of the last chapter is to recognize that Christianity gives new and powerful and transformative impetus to the question, ‘What are you waiting for?’. That is this chapter’s subject.

In Beckett’s Murphy in Chapter 9, we find that the eponymous character’s quest for self-validation is an aspect of an autistic spectrum disorder and that it is his relentless attraction to patterns that draws him to Mr. Endon. In the game of chess between Endon and Murphy, it is the former’s refutation of any kind of analogy that spins Murphy out of himself and ultimately leads, in an absurd but also interconnected concatenation of small steps, to his death by a gas explosion in his garret. As in other works of Beckett, our attention is rivetted on the absurd semiotic of language itself as an aspect of hermeneutical delirium. This is closely tied to Murphy’s aporetic speech that is also part of his autistic syndrome. The failure to find a reflection of himself in the mind of Mr. Endon is what ultimately undoes Murphy’s sense of self-integration and triggers his rapid unravelling.