In their isolated living room Julius and Olaf experience a sort of cultivated indifference as they strive to attain absolute lack of volition. They sit in their armchairs, and while Olaf gazes around the room Julius watches the outside world through the window, providing a commentary on human activity outside. He casually remarks of one passing woman: “... even her walk has the air of someone lolling around, something lazy, glossy-magazine reading, curl-twisting, screen-pale.” Shortly afterwards the young woman in person - who we shall later know as Marie Steuber - enters the room and begins to talk about her life. Gradually more characters appear in this space, prompted by the most varied motivations. One man thinks that he lost his watch here, at a party which he believes took place in this room, while an impatient woman is in search of a gentleman she met the previous evening, and a man called Frank Arnold is looking for Marie Steuber, having missed her at the airport, while a man in a winter coat carriers in a sleeping woman - who is then kidnapped by an absolute stranger. They all encounter each other in constantly changing constellations. This results in trivial, everyday situations, fairy-tale and menacing moments, fragmentary encounters, miniature scenes triggered by temporal and spatial impulses, which begin entirely without warning and are quite capable of ending just as abruptly.